Clement Greenberg Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 “Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg”, Dis Voir Editions

• 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

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

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Want, Habit

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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”

• 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”

• 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

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

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Artist, Solve

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

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, May, Very Good

  1991 In the NewYork Times, 3 Oct.

• 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

• 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

• Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Sacrifice, Successful

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, "T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244, 1961.

• 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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