Clement Greenberg Art And Culture Critical Essays 21m63

* Text Note, page 7 A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, t o justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted noti ons upon which artists and * Text Note, page 8 A superior consciousness of history-more pre- cisely, the appearance of a new ki nd of criticism of society, an historical criticism-made this possible. * Text Note, page 8 It was no accident, therefore, that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chron ologically-and geographically, too-with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europeâ ¢ * Text Note, page 9 Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to mainta in the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradic- tions would be either re solved or beside the point. "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear, and s ubject matter or eontent becomes something to be avoided like a plague. * Text Note, page 19 n Repin, on the other hand, the "reflected" effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator's unreflective enjoyment.4 Where Picasso pa ints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spar es him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic ar t. The same point can be made with respect to kitsch litera- ture: it provides v icarious experience for the insensitive with far greater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. * Text Note, page 21 Most often this resentment toward culture is to be found where the dissatis- fac tion with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which ex- presses itself in r evivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torc hes begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godlines s or the blood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statu e-smashing commences. * Text Note, page 22 It will be objected that such art for the masses as folk art was developed under rudimentary conditions of production_nd that a good deal of lolk art is on a hi gh level. Yes, it is-but folk art is not Athene, and it's Athenc whom we want: f ormal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehens ion. Besides, we are now told that most of what we con- sider good in folk cultu re is the static survival of dead formal, aristoeratic, cultures. Our old Englis h ballads, for instance, were not created by the ''folk,'' but by the post-feuda l squirearchy of the English countryside, to survive in the mouths of the folk l ong after those for whom the ballads were composed had gone on to other forms of literature. Unfortunately, until the machine- age, culture was the exclusive pr erogative of a society that lived by the labor of serfs or slaves. They were the real symbols of culture. For one man to spend time and energy creating or liste ning to poetry meant that another man had to produce enough to keep himself aliv e and the former in com- fort. In Africa today we find that the culture of slave -owning tribes is gener- ally much superior to that of the tribes that possess n o slaves. * Text Note, page 25 Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of prod ucing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances in cultu

re, no less than ad- vances in science and industry, corrode the very society un der whose aegis they are made possible.. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look towar d socialism for a new culture-as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preserva- tion of whatever living culture we have right now.