Art Criticism
WILLIAM PHILLIPS:
This session is devoted to the state of contempo–
rary art criticism. Clement Greenberg has played a leading role in the
development of contemporary art criticism. I was going to say that
he's the father of contemporary art criticism, but I thought it would
make him feel too old. Donald Kuspit is coeditor of
Art Criticism-a
new magazine and a good one. Clement Greenberg will talk first.
Clement Greenberg
Value judgments constitute the substance of aesthetic expe–
rience. I don't want to argue this assertion. I point to it as a fact, the fact
that identifies the presence, the reality in experience of the aesthetic. I
don't want to argue, either, about the nature of aesthetic value
judgments. They are acts of intuition, and intuition remains unanalyz–
able.
The fact of aesthetic intuition, as distinguished from other kinds
of intuition, has, for lack of a better word, to be called Taste. This word
has acquired unfortunate connotations since the nineteenth century,
for what are really irrelevant reasons. That great literary critic F.R.
Leavis, while insisting on the primacy of value judgment, avoided the
word for-as it seems to me-fear of these connotations. Instead, he
resorted to "sensibility" or circumlocutions like "feeling for value" or
"sense of value." (I may not be quoting with exactness, but I'm not
misrepresenting.) I want to try to rehabilitate the word; Taste is the
handiest term for what's meant, and somehow the bluntest-in part
precisely because of the disrepute into which it has fallen. The word
dri ves home the fact that art is first of all, and most of all, a question of
liking and of not liking-just so. Liking and not liking have to do with
value, and nothing else.
It's as though the shying away from the use of the word, Taste, had
been a portent of the present general tendency to shy away from what
it, or its synonyms, means. There is a reluctance nowadays to express
value judgments in criticism-at least in criticism of painting and
