566
p
ARTISAN REVIEW
these characteristics. The art he liked least, Surrealism, Pop, Conceptual
art - anything that put literary content or ideas ahead of formal considera–
tions - did not. But it was the art that led the way. Greenberg's "home–
made aesthetics" were formulated to account for the phenomenology of
the art he found most compelling; the art was not made in response to his
formulations.
There's a strong element of Marxist dialectic in Greenberg's view of
"the way art works," not surprising in someone of his background and
generation. Like most intelligent N ew Yorkers who lived through the
Depression, he was attracted to Marxism and repulsed by Stalinism -
which is to say, like many intelligent New Yorkers, he was a Trotskyist -
but by the late 1940s he claimed to be a "disabused Marxist."
Anticommunist but liberal during the 1950s, he could sound downright
reactionary in his last two decades, although it was sometimes difficult to
tell how much of it was pure contrariness. Generally speaking, Greenberg
was scrupulous in his separation of art and politics; goodness and badness
in art, he believed, had nothing to do with political or social content. Yet
Marxist attitudes inform his earliest writings, perhaps most notably in the
seminal "Avant-garde and Kitsch," 1939, in which he ponders the va–
garies of taste within the polarities of high and popular culture. He re–
turned to the theme in "The Plight of Our Culture," 1953, an explo–
ration of the fate of high art in a society formed by a new combination of
capitalism, democracy, and a rising postwar "middlebrow" culture. He
finds nothing reassuring in this situation, since unlike the essentially peas–
ant culture posited in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," which declared its dif–
ference from high culture by its consistent admiration for the slick and the
ersatz,
modern middlebrow culture embraces both good and bad, appar–
ently without making the kind of critical distinctions that Greenberg
deemed imperative. (In his introduction to Volume Three, O'Brian reads
"The Plight of Our Culture" as a reversal of Greenberg's earlier views, a
capitulation to right-wing pieties and middle-class values, an interpreta–
tion that seems unsupported by the text.) Greenberg rarely shifted his at–
tention as unequivocally from art to the society that produced the art as
he did in his early essays, but he was absorbed by questions of taste for the
rest of his life.
A 1940 essay, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," is one of the earliest dis–
cussions of another recurring theme: the gradual, perhaps historically in–
evitable, separation of high art - painting and sculpture, that is - from
explicit literary content and illusionism. The title, which refers to a cele–
brated eighteenth-century text, signals Greenberg's desire to join the great
tradition of aesthetic discourse. The essay is an examination of the mean–
ing and nature of abstraction, a line of inquiry expanded and deepened in
