Clement Greenberg Quotes - Page 2

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• It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Quality, Beholder

  Clement Greenberg, Robert C. Morgan (2007). “Clement Greenberg, Late Writings”, Univ Of Minnesota Press

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• Art criticism, I would say, is about the most ungrateful form of 'elevated' writing I know of. It may also be one of the most challenging.. if only because so few people have done it well enough to be remembered.. but I'm not sure the challenge is worth it.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Writing, People

  Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (1988). “The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949”, p.334, University of Chicago Press

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• Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

  Clement Greenberg

  Truth, Honesty, Heart

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.146, Beacon Press

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• I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Photography, Art, Bases

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• Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

  Clement Greenberg

  Kitsch, Formulas

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.10, Beacon Press

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• With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Portraits, Portraiture

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• The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience

  Clement Greenberg

  Discovery, Availability, Kitsch

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• Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.

  Clement Greenberg

  Light, Different, Levels

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.11, Beacon Press

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• One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Tortoises, Recognition

  Clement Greenberg (1961). “Hofmann: twelve color plates, twenty-one black and white illustrations”

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• The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

  Clement Greenberg

  Effort, Cezanne, Evolution

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, "On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting" (1949), p. 171, 1961.

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• For every good art critic there may be ten great artists.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, May, Very Good

  1991 In the NewYork Times, 3 Oct.

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• A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

  Clement Greenberg

  Nature, Eye, Views

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.201, Beacon Press

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• Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Recognition, Composer

  Clement Greenberg (1961). “Hofmann: twelve color plates, twenty-one black and white illustrations”

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• Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough.

  Clement Greenberg

  Sin, Enough, Accepted

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.31, Beacon Press

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