Quote

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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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
Things
Small
Images
Eyes
Unity
Eye
Picture
Nature
Large
Give
View
Instantaneous
Best
Single
Glance
Take
Views
Glances
Giving
Create
Relatively

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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.
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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.
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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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When you don't like something the words come more readily.
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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.
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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.
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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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Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art Modernism used art to call attention to art.
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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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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.
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The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.
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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.
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Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.
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.
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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.
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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.
Clement Greenberg