STATE OF CRITICISM
45
because it refers to the relativity that consciousness of the particularity
of art gives us, but this does not excuse it. Ultimately, the approach to
art through aesthetic intuition, yearning as it does for the metaphysical
absoluteness or ontological independence of art, is more uncritical of
art than the most naive description of it. Or perhaps the results of
aesthetic intuition are the most naive description of it.
What is the alternative-what is true criticism? Is there any
reconciliation between taste and interpretation, between the evaluative
and the descriptive? Greenberg has given us a half-truth, bifurcating
criticism into true and false parts. But in the current paper he seems to
do more than make a distinction: the wisdom of Solomon decides to cut
supposedly infantile art criticism in half, assuming that the better half
will live. But there is another solution, which Greenberg himself
would have recognized, had his take on Kant not been so limited, as we
have already shown. What Greenberg does not recognize is that taste is
a numinous concept, that is, a heuristic, regulatory device, a revelation
of the "ideal" limits of art. The judgment of taste no longer has to
stand on its absoluteness or universality to make itself good. Its value is
that it clears a field of art-without presupposing its teleological
necessity, its existence as a completely determinate, completely purpo–
sive order. Taste is that "clearing of being" Heidegger spoke of,
which first represents the realm in which beings are known as
disclosed in their unhiddenness. This coming forth of beings into the
" there" of their Dasein obviously presupposes a realm of openness in
which such a 'there' can occur. And yet it is just as
obviou~
that this
realm does not exist without beings manifesting themselves in it,
that is, without there being a place of openness that openness
occupies.
Taste is that clearing of being in which artistic beings appear, are
disclosed
in
their unhiddenness. The reciprocity between taste and
artistic beings is crucial: there is no clearing in which the artistic
beings are disclosed (however hidden they remain). I see this view of
taste as the redemption of aesthetic intuition, and a way of reconciling
it-as Greenberg refuses to do-with the varieties of interpretative
analysis of art. For, as Heidegger asserts, the work of art, like every
other being, is a "conflict between revealment and concealment": its
truth is always their "opposition. " As Heidegger says, "Being contains
something like hostility to its own presentations," and it is crucial
to
the task of criticism not only to make a clearing in consciousness for
the kind of beings works of art are by means of aesthetically intuitive
taste, but also to attempt, through so-called interpretation-a word as
