Clement Greenberg: Private and Public Art
On my bookshelf, as of yet unfinished, is a collection of Late Writings by the instrumental Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg. His wonderfully accessible prose lays out a series of arguments, analyses and questions that I find as challenging as they are illuminating. One of Greenburg’s principal arguments is for an objective standard of taste; I tend to fall on either side of the fence for this one depending on which day you ask. What about the subjective associations and reactions that a piece of art, or even a plain object such as a water jug, can move in individuals?
Greenberg does not overlook the question of subjectivity, offering instead a lucid interpretation:
…it has become clearer, too, that anything that can be experienced at all can be experienced aesthetically; and that anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced as art. In short, art and the aesthetic don’t just overlap, they coincide (as Croce suspected, but didn’t conclude). The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skillful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing–an act that can be performed even without the help of sense perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art. There turns out, accordingly, to be such a thing as art at large, art that is realized or realizable everywhere, even if for the most part inadvertently, momentarily, and solipsistically: art that is private, “raw,” and unformalized (which doesn’t mean “formless,” of which there is no such thing). And because this art can and does feed on anything within the realm of conceivability, it is virtually omnipresent among human beings.
This “raw,” ubiquitous art doesn’t as a rule move anybody more than minimally on the aesthetic level, however much it might do so on the level of consolation or therapy or even of the “sublime.” It’s literally and truly minimal art. And it’s able to remain that because in its usual privacy it is sheltered from the pressure of expectations and demands. Art starts from expectation and satisfaction, but only under the pressure of heightened expectation–expectation as schooled and heightened by sufficient aesthetic experience–does art lift itself out of its “raw” state, make itself communicable, and become what society considers to be art proper, public art.
Duchamp’s “theoretical” feat was to show that “raw” art could be formalized, made public, simply by setting it in a formalized art situation, and without trying to satisfy expectations–at least not in principle. Since Duchamp this formalizing of “raw” art by fiat has become a stereotype of avant-gardist practice, with the claim being made, always, that new areas of nonart are being won for art thereby. All this has actually amounted to, however, is that public attention is called to something that was art to begin with, and banal as that, and which is made no more intrinsically interesting by being put into a recognized art context. (“Counter-Avant-Garde,” Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, p. 13-4)
