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It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.

Clement Greenberg

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Clement Greenberg
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: January 16
Died: 1994
Died: May 7
Art Collector
Art Critic
Art Historian
Art Theorist
Essayist
Journalist
The Bronx
New York City
K. Hardesh
Become
Apparent
Part
Spectacular
Character
Upset
Anything
Impact
Without
Taste
Really
Safe
Good
Saying
Upsetting
Art
Startling

More quotes by Clement Greenberg

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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 and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.
Clement Greenberg
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Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.
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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 of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.
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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 in contemporary sensibility.
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A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.
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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 - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.
Clement Greenberg
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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 its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.
Clement Greenberg
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Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.
Clement Greenberg
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The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.
Clement Greenberg
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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 ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough.
Clement Greenberg
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Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.
Clement Greenberg
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When you don't like something the words come more readily.
Clement Greenberg
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Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.
Clement Greenberg
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Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
Clement Greenberg
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The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.
Clement Greenberg
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The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.
Clement Greenberg
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Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it.
Clement Greenberg
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Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.
Clement Greenberg
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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 culture unresolved.
Clement Greenberg
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I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.
Clement Greenberg