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PARTISAN REVIEW
comfortable, dignified leisure in order to cultivate the arts properly?
It's a sad fact of human existence up to now, or let's say urban
existence.
DONALD KUSPIT: Clem, does this consensus issue in a necessary and
singular hierarchy of value of works of art?
CLEMENT GREENBERG: There are differences in evaluation among
different artists, and ups and downs, but within the consensus,
there's a certain floor below which the great old masters don 't fall.
You might say that some of Raphael 's frescoes in the Vatican aren't
that good, but even so Raphael doesn't fall too far.
DONALD KUSPIT: Weren 't there at least two centuries in which Raphael
was put down? There were about three centuries in which Diirer was
put down as a mere technician. What do you do with those centuries?
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Has there been progress in the arts? There has
been progress in taste because taste has become more catholic. Taste
is supposed to be catholic. Good taste is catholic taste. Good taste
likes anything that 's good and dislikes anything that's bad, regard–
less of where it comes from, and it doesn 't proscribe verisimilitude
and it doesn 't proscribe abstraction. It 's ready-taste at its best, in its
fullest sense, likes whatever is good, regardless of where it comes
from. Taste is involuntary.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN: My question is on the same subject, about histori–
cal shifting of value judgments. I think perhaps you passed too
lightly over your statement that Giotto and Masaccio had gone up
since the nineteenth century. I would pursue the question of whether
there aren 't changes in the faculty of seeing art or the faculty of
hearing music, and how these come about. I think that kind of
change, that kind of historical shift in consensus, whether it's elitist
or not, is something we have also experienced in our own lives. Can
taste or can the eye be educated? One thing I would want to connect
with that is the question of the relation between the changing
patterns of the historical consensus and contemporary work. When
you have the beginning of abstraction in painting or the beginnings
of experimental work in literature, you begin not only to see things
in earlier works that you couldn 't see before, but in a sense you also
create a different tradition. Suddenly you have a new vocabulary
with which to reevaluate past works.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Let me say first that aesthetic experience is never
dependent on the tools of discourse. We may not have a concept for
something, but you still experience it. What is curious here is
whether ways of seeing or hearing change radically. I doubt it, but
all these rediscoveries-the rediscovery of Giotto in the nineteenth
