46
PARTISAN REVIEW
inadequate as " taste" -to present and re-present works of art, attempt–
ing to overcome their hostility to their existing presentations in
consciousness. Criticism overcomes the concealment of art by exploit–
ing its compulsion for revealment. It grasps the work of art by playing
its concealment against its revealment. Aesthetic intuition sets the stage
for this hermeneutic game. The folly of Greenberg's position in his
current paper is that an obsolete conception of taste used as a source for
the autonomy of art has led him to falsify the total critical enterprise.
The moment that he begins to see that taste is necessary to art, not as a
sign of its autonomy, but as the first step in its revelation, he will once
again become truly critical, and will comprehend the fullness that
criticism can attain. Using the idea of intuitive taste to buttress the idea
of art for art's sake he cannot begin to be a critic, for he cannot begin to
see the world that, as Heidegger says, arises in the work of art, like an
event-and with a thrust that mocks the entire question of the indepen–
dence or dependence, absoluteness or contingency, of art.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Clem, you have a chance to answer these weighty
assertions.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Thanks, Mr. Kuspit. I didn't mean that ironi–
cally, either. You know aesthetic intuition shares its impenetrability
of analysis with ordinary intuition, with intuition in the first place.
We can't analyze what takes place in us when we see blue as blue,
what takes place in consciousness. We may be able to decide what
takes place in our irises and retinas. But we can't analyze what takes
place in consciousness when we touch something and that goes for
the rest of the senses. And so aesthetic intuition doesn 't enjoy a
privileged place by reason of its impermeability to discursive or
conceptual analysis. So much for that. The absoluteness I talk of is
not a metaphysical absoluteness, it's the absoluteness of experience.
Aesthetic experience is not privileged in this respect either.
It
just
happens. Aesthetic experience is not confined to made art. It is not
confined to what the Greeks called
techne.
Anything that enters
experience except aesthetic experience itself can be experienced
aesthetically. Aesthetic experience is not privileged. Aesthetic intui–
tion, taste (and Mr. Kuspit quite properly called me on this infor–
mally yesterday) is formed, it's developed. Maybe sharpness of
hearing can be developed, I don't know. Aesthetic experience is
developed. We may be born with a capacity for it, but we don't all
necessarily develop it. I don't believe any human being in possession
