- Helen Frankenthaler
- Anne Truitt
- Kenneth Noland
- De Kooning
- Lee Krasner
- Clifford Still
- Morris Louis
- Ray Mead
- Hepworth
- Jack Bush
Ten Artists I Love that Clement Greenberg Hated:
- Agnes Martin
- Donald Judd
- Andy Warhol
- Jasper Johns
- Rauschenberg
- Cy Twombly
- Stephen Shore
- Lewis Baltz
- Faith Rhingold
- David Wojoncawoiz
6 comments:
I remember reading some clement greenberg for art history... my impression; he was way too authoritative, formalist, and cocky. He also wrote about kitsch; called the New Yorker kitsch but in writing about kitsch missed the whole point and meaning. would you agree?
reading kundera on kitsch was more productive then reading greenberg, that said, i think kitsch is the provience of the working class women and gay men, two groups of people he never really appreciated
...and i also think that pop was at times, under the right circumstances a politicizing/democratizing influence, and i think that it did usurp the power of the authoritative critics...but i think that the thing we lost when we stopped listening to greenberg is the ability to talk about art completely formally--in terms of colour or shape or form, it is rarely discussed, for example, how important the brush strokes were in warhol's work from 62 onward...but i also think that genuinely important and brilliant painters are now lost because the length and volume of his discourses drowned others that could be written about them, this is esp. egregious in how he treated his lover Frankenthaler, who's Mountains and Sea is one of the most impt formal works in the american half of the 20th century (and even w/o the gender politics, I think that Kenneth Noland is one of the best living painters, and one of the reason's why we never talk about him is because Greenberg spent so much time on really awful painters, that the good ones get lost--i mean Poons, Olitiski?!)
---which is the problem with formalism, isn't it, you can hide alot of cruelty, chauvinism, misogyny, and homophobia by just pretending to be talking about art for art's sake (and you can see that in Greenberg's acoylate the sculptor Ryan McCourt, from Edmonton, and how he engages wiht the local, queer friendly, pyscho-geographically acute Edmonton critic Amy Fung, but that might be because Amy has engaged with my work, and McCourt has not...and Fung has not really engaged with the modernists that have a strangely privileged position locally...(i am writing this from Toronto, so it's weird that it still feels local)
so i don't know, is that an answer?
...cruelty, chauvinism, misogyny, and homophobia...
Wow. Stay classy, Anthony.
i can back up every single one of those points. and i never promised to be classy
greenberg talked about kitsch when it meant something different; the capitalism he hated and wanted to scape through abstraction. it went on to represent the waste of capitalism, in a more ironic form, afterwards. which he hated too, i think...
can you explain what you mean by the waste of capitalism, because this was a pretty standard mitteleuropean aesthetic/marxist arguement against populist culture for a couple of decades before greenberg, if it means what i think you are saying...
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