STATE OF CRITICISM
47
of his or her full senses is without aesthetic experience. There's
nothing metaphysical here. To say that something is absolute is not
to
give it metaphysical status. As far as Heidegger is concerned, I
have to confess that I don't have the competence to say that Heideg–
ger is largely full of hot air. I'm not competent to say that and I know
that dismissing Heidegger as hot air is vulgar and ignorant, but I
have to confess further that I didn't understand in terms that were
useful to me, or could be useful to me, or, were I hypothetically to
accept them, that I would make sense of, what Mr. Kuspit meant or
what Heidegger meant as quoted by Mr. Kuspit. That's all.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I'd like to start off by asking you a question, Clem. I
was wondering how you would conceive of the relation between the
taste or intuition of individuals and collective taste.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: That question is one that Croce dodged, and
Croce was one of the greatest aestheticians. Susanne Langer is
serious and good and it's a question she dodges too. Santayana, too.
The question is whether taste, or judgments, or aesthetic value
judgments are subjective or objective. Kant, and it shows his mettle,
faced it head on and he had to posit something called
sensus
communis,
a common sense that all human beings shared. I don 't
think he solved it. He let it go. I retreat to experience like a good
American. I've noticed that such a thing has emerged, a long time
ago, as a consensus of taste. It's very pragmatic. When it comes to,
let's say, Western painting, you may not like this or that about
Raphael, but if you can see painting, by God you know Raphael was
a very great painter and you know Michelangelo was too and Titian
and Pierot and Giotto and Rubens and so forth. This consensus of
taste recreates itself constantly. New generations arise and we more
or less think the old masters aren 't that good or we want to change,
radically change, the hierarchy, and we do to some extent. We may
put Pierot up much higher than we used to; since the nineteenth
century we've put Masaccio and Giotto up higher than they were at
the beginning. That goes on all the time and it's part of the necessary
process of reevaluation, but we don't overturn the overall consensus.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS:
If
there is no other question immediately, I'll ask
another one. Il seems to me that you derive a great deal of weight and
emphasis from experience as well as from original capacity and
intuition.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: The consensus over the ages is formed by those
who care most, spend most time, try hardest, get closest. It's an elitist
consensus. Alas, alas , alas. I mean that word to come up. Of course
it's an elitist consensus. And didn't Marx himself say it required
