A Conversation with Clement Greenberg
Continued from part I…

Russell Bingham: In Edmonton we profit by being, in a certain sense, isolated and having kind of a pressure cooker environment for making art. But there’s also the fact that the world-at-large doesn’t know about art here and the art here is only measured up against the other art here. So in that sense, would artists here get better if they had the opportunity to show in New York and have their art seen in a larger context?

Clement Greenberg: I don’t think it would make much difference. I know that about 31 years ago people like (Morris) Louis, (Kenneth) Noland, and (Jules) Olitski fared well in their art because they lived outside New York. But not too far away, so they could come to New York and see what they didn’t want to do. (I mean that literally.) But New York itself ate artists up.

Elizabeth Kidd: New York is sort of seen as a testing ground. If you can survive New York, you can survive anything, but I wonder really what that means.

CG: For the art or the artist? That’s deceptive. At my age you begin to repeat yourself very much… but, since Manet’s time, since the 1850s, the best new art is kept in the background and it usually takes a decade or two to come to the foreground. That was Manet’s fate and that was the Impressionists’ fate. You can tell that by sales, market, press. And the pattern hasn’t changed since then. There are exceptions now. I think Picasso was an early success. Matisse certainly wasn’t. The stars of yesteryear, like Pollock. Pollock had to sweat it out for a dozen years. David Smith. It hasn’t changed. The best new art, it’s still back-stage.

EK: If you were an advisor to putting together a show of Western art to send East what would it be like? Would it be a group show?

CG: Probably, but my relation to this place and Saskatoon is such that it doesn’t belong. Group shows are usually fatal. The Triangle group shows in New York…. Everybody’s diminished in some way. I organized a show of Syracuse painters for Skidmore College a couple of years ago. And, damn it, the show, as a whole, disappointed me and disappointed a lot of other people. So I’ve become wary of group shows. Selecting the right artists would be difficult too.

Mark Joslin: I guess that’s why a lot of contemporary curators choose to arrange exhibitions around ideas; it’s easier to reject and accept people on the basis of how they fit into a scheme.

CG: I haven’t noticed that, that much. I think most curators of contemporary art are not as good as they should be. With all due respect.

RRB: What should they be doing better?

CG: They don’t look hard enough. They succumb to trends – whether you go to the Hirshhorn, or to the Walker, or whether you go to Boston Fine Arts, or Boston Museum of Contemporary Art, or whether you go to the Whitney.

Roger H. Boulet: Couldn’t they defend themselves by saying that they’re doing as you suggest they should do, which is showing a sampling of everything that’s made.

CG: They don’t. They exercise their taste implicitly. A so-called “formalist” hasn’t been included in a Whitney annual or biennial in seven or eight years.

EK: So they’re being just as narrow in another way. Are you saying that if everybody were looking and those who had developed the “best eye” they would all agree on the same people?

CG: It takes time for the agreement to emerge. The consensus emerges only over time.

EK: You don’t think taste is also developed by looking at other kinds of things, or perhaps seeing things that other people haven’t seen that are probably just as good? There’s a wide range of tastes that are all, if you want, “good” but they can be different, surely?

CG: No, I don’t agree when it comes to contemporary art. No.

EK: Contemporary art. Whereas when you look at historical art, it’s different?

CG: The art of the past has already been sifted by the consensus of taste. The big names are there and they’ve been confirmed, they’ve been ratified. When the Met puts on a big show it’s a big name. They’re not going to show [unknowns]. The consensus missed George de la Tour, missed El Greco until the mid-19th century, and they missed Vermeer because they couldn’t identify him.

I think in de la Tour’s case, he lived in Alsace; and El Greco was in Spain and people didn’t go there for a long while. Maybe some other artists got in their own way. Van Gogh would have been a rich man, I think, had he lived another five or ten years. The consensus will make mistakes now and then, too, like overrating Salvatore Rosa, or as I say, Michelangelo’s sculpture – one of the biggest mistakes I think the consensus made. He was a great painter, but not such a good sculptor. And Wyndham Lewis anticipated me by writing that.

RRB: Do you feel that people living today that have good taste tend very often to focus on the same artist?

CG: Contemporary artists or in the past?

RRB: Contemporary artists.

CG: With good taste? I know so few. Many fewer than twenty-five to thirty years ago. I knew people whose disagreements with me would trouble me, give me pause. I don’t meet them anymore… I haven’t met any… either abroad or here. Now that sounds arrogant, I know, but that’s the way I feel. I’m not bothered about disagreements about contemporary art anymore. You know, maybe it’s something I missed or something like that. If someone like Arshile Gorky disagreed with me, I was given pause…

RRB: You’re saying that these are people whose opinion and taste you respected. Is it important to have confidence in your taste?

CG: That’s all you’ve got. In order to express it, you have to have confidence I suppose.

RRB: There’s no point in qualifying it by saying, “but it’s only my taste”?

CG: No! What has anyone got but their own taste?

RHB: To me, the problem is as curators that’s a very very small limb to stand on.

CG: There’s no other.

To be continued…