Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste

by Clement Greenberg, Charles T. Harrison (Introduction)

Overview

Thanks to his unsurpassed eye and his fearless willingness to take a stand, Clement Greenberg (1909 1994) became one of the giants of 20th century art criticism a writer who set the terms of critical discourse from the moment he burst onto the scene with his seminal essays Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) and Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940). In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington in 1971, Greenberg provides his most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art, arguing for an esthetic that flies in the face of current art world fashions. Greenberg insists despite the attempts from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged that taste is inexorable. He argues that standards of quality in art, the artist's responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic's responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. The obsession with innovation the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenbergs view, to the boringness of so much avant garde art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us particularly in the transcribed seminar sessions, never before published to watch the critics mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories. His views, often controversial, are the record of a lifetime of looking at and thinking about art as intensely as anyone ever has.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198031901
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/19/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	1230L (what's this?)
File size:	403 KB

About the Author

Clement Greenberg's books include Art and Culture and four volumes of collected essays and criticism. Charles T. Harrison of the Open University, co editor of Art in Theory 1900 1990 and one of the leading writers on modernism, has written an introduction placing Homemade Esthetics in the context of Greenbergs work and the evolution of 20th century critism.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Janice Van Horne GreenbergAcknowledgmentsIntroduction by Charles HarrisonPART IThe EssaysIntuition and Esthetic ExperienceEsthetic JudgmentCan Taste Be Objective? The Factor of SurpriseJudgment and the Esthetic ObjectConvention and InnovationThe Experience of ValueThe Language of Esthetic DiscourseObservations on Esthetic DistancePART IIThe Bennington College Seminars, April 6-22, 1971Night OneNight TwoNight ThreeNight FourNight FiveNight SixNight SevenNight EightNight NineAppendixFurther ReadingIndex

Editorial Reviews

Homemade Esthetics, by Clement Greenberg (Oxford University Press, 1999), was prepared posthumously by Janice Van Horne Greenberg, widow of the eminent but still controversial critic who in the 1940s first brought Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism as a movement to public attention. This book combines an edited transcript of nine seminar meetings he held at Bennington College in April, 1971, with nine essays based on them, of which most were published between 1973 and 1979. An appendix gives a draft of the first chapter of a projected book by Greenberg, which was to be titled Homemade Esthetics, and explicate his mature artistic philosophy, as outlined in the seminars and articles based on them. Anybody with a real interest in 20th century art will want to buy Homemade Esthetics, whether or not they share Greenberg's taste in his later years, because this book, more than any of his other writings, spells out the theoretical basis for his criticism that he'd arrived at after decades of trying and discarding other bases. It lets one admire the clarity of his writing, but also, in the transcript, hear how he sounded in person, which was much more colloquial and understandable, even if sometimes so acid that if you didn't share his taste, you could get awfully angry.....his idealism is manifest in this book, and his serene Neo-Kantian conviction that there is indeed greater and lesser art, that these priorities are determined by a consensus of enlightened viewers over the centuries, and that his own taste would be proven objective by the verdicts of the future. As for the present, Greenberg argues that the only consistent thing about the best new art is "the inconsistency of these things---that's just it. Then you get surprised, and you find out you can't make any safe generalizations. That's part of the fun of art....
— From the Mayor's Doorstep

Piri Halasz

...a major event. With sparkle, wisdom and energy Greenberg speaks to the present situation in art more pertinently and persuasively than any contemporary theorist...disarmingly pragmatic, suggestive of a liberal curiosity and catholic taste...
— NY Times Book Review

David Cohen

Greenberg, with critical aplomb, describes both the challenges of good art and the nature of bad, or mediocre art.
—ForeWord

Taylor

"Greenberg will be remembered...for having produced a body of writing about art that is fully worthy of comparison with the best work of the best critics of the twentieth century. Even now it is impossible to read him without being stirred by his aesthetic convictions."—Terry Teachout, National Review

Greenberg's Seminars, collected here for the first time, are the summation of his remarkable career as a critic and theorist.... Going through this book I was reminded yet again what a compelling writer Greenberg is—and how much pleasure I get from reading him."—John O'Brian, editor, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism

"Greenberg wrote the abiding philosophy of art for the period in which he flourished, and he did so in language that embodied the virtues of the aesthetic it enjoined."—Arthur Danto, Artforum

"Not many in the long history of art have looded as deeply into art's mystery, or dreamed more deeply on its purpose.... There is treasure on every page."—Jules Olitsky

"Non one who cares about modern culture can ignore Clement Greenberg's densely reasoned arguments and often dazzling insightful observations."—Karen Wilkin, The New Criterion

From the Publisher