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PARTISAN REVIEW
Baudelaire, we find that many people said Baudelaire was wrong
about the artists he acknowledged, but so what? Even if he was right
it didn ' t matter. What he had to say was certainly extraordinarily
interesting and valuable.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: I'll say the same for Ruskin, one of the greatest
handlers of language I'm aware of. I'll disagree with Ruskin around
the clock, and yet I find he's a delight to read and not just because of
his language.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: It seems to me that what Donald Kuspit is saying is
that other factors enter into a judgment besides what Clement
Greenberg is calling intuition and taste. I think it might be interest–
ing if you could try to specify what other factors get in and how they
relate to judgment.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Your whole being is involved in aesthetic
intuition. You don 't look with your eye alone, you don't read with
your understanding.
DONALD KUSPIT: Codes enter in. What we call cultural logic enters in.
Now how you specify that cultural logic, whether you use a lan–
guage of codes and lingusitic terminology or use dialectical metho–
dology is not an issue.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: I happen to agree. It's developed intuition, but
there it is. Intuition is there.
UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: I would like to ask Mr. Greenberg how we
might reasonably expect to get frank and lusty criticism of modern
art when those of us who have been in art history class and read art
history and music history are constantly being bombarded with
information about the mistakes of the past: how the critics in the
1860s and 1870s misunderstood Manet and so forth.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: The history of these mistakes began only in the
1860s. Before that most artists of merit were recognized fairly soon. It
was only in the 1860s-it started with Baudelaire, Flaubert, and
especially Manet-that the better you were, in a sense, the longer you
had to wait for recognition. That's a modernist phenomenon and it
still holds true today. The rule hasn't been broken and I hope to see it
broken any moment. It's recent. Now the fact that so many mistakes
were made within the past 150 years or so is not supposed to frighten
us. We still look at art for ourselves, we still hear music for ourselves,
we read for ourselves maybe. It's a nice challenge, being aware that
you 're liable to make a fool of .yourself or your taste, certainly an
incentive to an art critic to bet his eye against the future. All too
many art critics are afraid to do that.
