Clement Greenberg Quotes

24 quotes in 400 categories

• Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which…
• All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
• You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work…
• Art criticism, I would say, is about the most ungrateful form of 'elevated' writing I know of. It may also be one of the most…
• It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The character itself of…
• The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.
• Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.
• The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound…
• The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.
• The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our…
• Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can…
• The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by…
• If you want to change your art, change your habits.
• I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one…
• Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet…
• Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.
• Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part…
• A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view…
• With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
• It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art... that held and moved…

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