COMMENTS
Clement Greenberg
Though Clement Greenberg was for a time my clos–
est friend, I have little to add to Karen Wilkin's brilliant and exhaustive
review of the biography by Florence Rubenfeld
[New Criterion,June
1998].
I might emphasize simply that I did not observe any inordinate power drive
in Clem. He just expressed his ideas and opinions, and whatever insistence
there was was that of leading critics in the past. But it should be remem–
bered that he had to present his views against the strong resistance to the
new painting and sculpture that Greenberg praised. As a matter of fact, to
get his art pieces printed in
Partisan R eview,
I had to struggle against the
backward attitudes in the field of art by Rahv and the factional disagree–
ments by George
L.
K. Morris and James Johnson Sweeney.
I also did not notice any special hankering by Clem after hard drugs;
all that I saw was that he liked to take pills, and often he asked for pills that
I myself was taking. As for his drinking, he indulged no more than any of
us. We all drink too much.
The biography as a whole is unbalanced in that it stresses a power
drive and his personal peculiarities, instead of giving a full-bodied account
of his theories and approaches to painting and sculpture.
Art and the Bourgeoisie
Peter Gay's attempt to rescue the bourgeoisie
from the attacks on it by so many artists and thinkers is all to the good; in
fact, the history of Western art and thought is largely made up of assaults
on the crudeness of the bourgeoisie.
Peter Gay points out that without the financial support of the bour–
geoisie, Western art and thought could not have thrived. But I think some
addition here is necessary, for it was not the business culture that produced
the artists, writers, and philosophers in the West, but that part of the bour–
geoisie that made up the intelligentsia.
It should also be noted, though Peter Gay does not deny it, that the
bourgeoisie fostered a good deal of philistinism.
Of course, the situation today is vastly different, for what is sponsored
by the middle class and by the culture as a whole is a kind of trendy notion
of the
avant-garde,
a notion that supports all kinds of
reductio ad absurdems
of
genuine advanced art.
Sex and Morality
Norman Podhoretz has written an excellent account
and analysis of the whole
affair
involving President Clinton's escapades
[Commentary,
June 1998]. His observation of the split in the culture
between the traditional values of much of the population and the trendy
tendencies of the presumably advanced part is especially acute.
I have only one point to add. It seems to me quite arguable that sex is
a private matter, and has very little to do with morality, except when its
