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PARTISAN REVIEW
find it necessary to declare what they think about him in order to estab–
lish their
bona fides.
Paradoxically, despite their insistence on Greenberg's
irrelevance, they can't ignore him and he is invoked as the Antichrist must
have been invoked in medieval sermons. Michael
J.
Lewis, writing in
Commentary,
is one of the few reviewers to discuss this curious phenome–
non. (He's also, along with Teachout, one of the few to point out that
Rubenfeld's book virtually ignores the complicated politics, changing loy–
alties, and maturing attitudes toward Marx that marked relations among the
New York Intellectuals in Greenberg's day.) The art world, Lewis says, is
still haunted by Greenberg's discredited "ideas and prescriptions" because
"virtually everyone of them has been turned on its head." If Lewis reads
the collected criticism more carefully, he'll discover that what he calls
"prescriptions" are in fact
descriptions,
but he still makes an interesting
point. It's all too true that the desire for order and clarity, like the aspira–
tion toward excellence that spurred on Greenberg and the adventurous
artists of his generation, has been discarded. "The notion of a coherent and
logical course of artistic development intrinsic to every genre," Lewis
writes, "has been jettisoned in favor of a willed celebration of the provi–
sional, the improvised, the personal, and the arbitrary." The result, in
Lewis's view, has not been "an improvement upon the cultural vitality of
an earlier age, but a distinct and disastrous decline." In contrast to the self–
indulgence and slackness of postmodernism, as a corrective to its
indifference to formal rigor in the face of good intentions, or even as a
"secret ideal," Lewis suggests that we reexamine some of the things
Greenberg believed in most strongly, some of what he stood for : "auster–
ity, high intellectual integrity, the devotion to formal perfection." "If we
are lucky," Lewis says, these high-minded notions may "be with us for
some time to come." Happily, we have the four volumes. They preserve for
posterity what for many of us was the best of Rubenfeld's subject.
