PARTISAN REVIEW
answer something deep-seated in contemporary sensibility. It corresponds
perhaps to the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been ex–
hausted, that no area or order of experience is either intrinsically or rela–
tively superior to any other. It may speak for a monist naturalism that
takes all the world for granted and for which there are no longer either
first or last things, the only valid distinction being that between the
more and the less immediate. Or maybe it means something else-I
cannot tell. What, at least, it does mean for the discipline of painting
is that the future of the easel picture as the vehicle of ambitious art
has become very problematical; for in using the easel picture as they
do-and cannot help doing-these artists are destroying it.
Clement Greenberg
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