Clement Greenberg
For a summary of the critic, see: www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_market/what_did_cle...
Greenberg favored art that skillfully addressed formal problems, such as how to make paintings that are interesting up close as well as from a distance. When we move close to a late Titian painting, forms dissolve into brushstrokes that seem to make mysterious motifs of their own. This metamorphic effect (lacking in the paintings of Rubens, for example) was one solution.
Pollock's action paintings achieve the goal in a more completely abstract way. Rhythms and forms emerge from other rhythms and forms like eyes from the foliage of a forest. In space we see that the constellation has within it other patterns of stars.
At the spectrum's other end, the microscope reveals that 90% of the cells our bodies contain are actually something other than human. What is terrifying is revealed as the teeth of hitherto un-glimpsed depth. Within our own bodily form, there are other bodily forms seething within.
The complexities we can see through the telescope and the microscope are comparable to the potentially infinite richness revealed by Greenberg's close, zoomed-in, attention to the formal (purely visual) qualities of art.
But some artists and critics objected that art was being drained of meaning by Greenberg's tendency to value form more and to value representation less. They felt that Greenberg's approach encouraged art to become too aloof, too emotionally distant from the real world. They were similar to those who complained that society was being made lonelier and more alienating by the modern attitude which valued efficiency and marketability more than the human-ness of individuals.
Clement Greenberg
For a summary of the critic, see: www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_market/what_did_cle...
Greenberg favored art that skillfully addressed formal problems, such as how to make paintings that are interesting up close as well as from a distance. When we move close to a late Titian painting, forms dissolve into brushstrokes that seem to make mysterious motifs of their own. This metamorphic effect (lacking in the paintings of Rubens, for example) was one solution.
Pollock's action paintings achieve the goal in a more completely abstract way. Rhythms and forms emerge from other rhythms and forms like eyes from the foliage of a forest. In space we see that the constellation has within it other patterns of stars.
At the spectrum's other end, the microscope reveals that 90% of the cells our bodies contain are actually something other than human. What is terrifying is revealed as the teeth of hitherto un-glimpsed depth. Within our own bodily form, there are other bodily forms seething within.
The complexities we can see through the telescope and the microscope are comparable to the potentially infinite richness revealed by Greenberg's close, zoomed-in, attention to the formal (purely visual) qualities of art.
But some artists and critics objected that art was being drained of meaning by Greenberg's tendency to value form more and to value representation less. They felt that Greenberg's approach encouraged art to become too aloof, too emotionally distant from the real world. They were similar to those who complained that society was being made lonelier and more alienating by the modern attitude which valued efficiency and marketability more than the human-ness of individuals.