Clement Greenberg Quotes

Quotes about:

• Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Travel, Eye

  68 Copy quote

• Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Attention, Realistic

  Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (1995). “The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969”, p.86, University of Chicago Press

  23 Copy quote

• All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Work, Looks

  Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg (1996). “Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg”, Dis Voir Editions

  29 Copy quote

• Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Quality, Principles

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.133, Beacon Press

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• The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Reflection, Reality

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.243, Beacon Press

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• The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.

  Clement Greenberg

  Profound, Texture, Answers

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.157, Beacon Press

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• You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Eye, Sculpture

  22 Copy quote

• The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Influence, Strong Person

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

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• The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort

  Clement Greenberg

  Effort, Kitsch, Natural

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.18, Beacon Press

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• A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.

  Clement Greenberg

  Smell, Mind, Satisfaction

  20 Copy quote

• Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.

  Clement Greenberg

  Photography, Art, Men

  Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (1988). “The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949”, p.60, University of Chicago Press

  24 Copy quote

• Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Cutting, Kitsch

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.15, Beacon Press

  32 Copy quote

• If you want to change your art, change your habits.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Want, Habit

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• The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Views, Avant Garde

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.19, Beacon Press

  52 Copy quote

• Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Reality, Ideas

  Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (1995). “The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

  14 Copy quote

• The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Creating, Trying

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.6, Beacon Press

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• Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Artist, Solve

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• Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins.

  Clement Greenberg

  Sacrifice, Rooms, Logic

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

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• The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Photography, Art, Historical

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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. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

  Clement Greenberg

  Culture, Carrying On, Leisure

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, pp. 31-32: "The Plight of Culture" (1953), 1961.

  10 Copy quote

• When you don't like something the words come more readily.

  Clement Greenberg

  Like Something

  1991 Aged 82, on the relative ease of negative criticism over positive. In the NewYork Times, 3 Oct.

  16 Copy quote

• The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

  Clement Greenberg

  Culture, Carrying On, Leisure

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.32, Beacon Press

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• I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say, 'because,' you get into art jargon.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Numbers, Jargon

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• It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Character, Impact

  Clement Greenberg (1969). “Avant-garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties”

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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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