A Conversation with Clement Greenberg
Continued from parts I and II…

Russell Bingham: Is it important to build a good collection? Is that something that should be a main priority with an art museum?

Clement Greenberg: I’d tend to say yes, especially the further away you are from a metropolitan centre like New York.

Elizabeth Kidd: What is it that’s important about having a good collection in Edmonton?

CG: Because a lot of people cannot afford to go to New York, or even Chicago. That’s why. And the kids especially.

RRB: Are they going to see good contemporary art in New York?

CG: No, but they’re going to see good past art. That’s it.

Roger H. Boulet: It’s becoming a problem. I dislike talking about the market, but in many ways the market has passed us by. And you mentioned Morris Louis – he happens to be one of my favourite painters, but we’ll never be able to acquire a Morris Louis. It’s just beyond us now.

CG: The idea is, again, easier said than done. Buy early enough, when they’re cheap. That’s exercising taste the way only a critic can. Don’t think an institution can so readily. Let’s take the case of Pollock. The Museum of Modern Art could have bought any number of Pollocks for from $100 – $300 in his best days, before 1951. They did get one Pollock and a good one from his first show, and waited six years and got another one that wasn’t so good, in ’49. And that was it. And then after he died, after the early ’60s, especially – prices went up and up.

RRB: There’s a lot of good contemporary art that’s under $10,000.

RRB: Do you think that art critics in our century have a more important role than they did in the past? When you think they’re more of a recent phenomenon, the last 150 years or so…

CG: Not all that recent. Diderot in the eighteenth century started regular art reviewing. I think art criticism has declined.

RRB: But is it more critical though, even though it’s declined in the broad sense? Does the good stuff count more?

CG: Good art criticism? I can’t say. I know my stuff never counted much – which isn’t to say it was good criticism.

RRB: Speaking from my own experience, your stuff counts a lot.

CG: Only in retrospect.

RRB: I know a lot of people look to you and to other critics like you to provide encouragement. Was that always the case (in history)?

CG: I don’t know enough… that aspect of the past hasn’t been researched enough – put it that way. It’s like so many aspects… The French had a lot of art critics, most of whom wrote rather well I thought. They’re all in discredit now because they weren’t for the Impressionists.

EK: It seems to me that what you’re getting nowadays is star critics and star curators and the artists are often marginalized. There’s so much emphasis on art writing and theory and theoretical writing and curatorial approaches that somehow the art seems to get lost.

CG: I don’t agree with you. Maybe out here they do, but not in New York.

RRB: Related to this is my theory that there are important critics and they count quite a bit to artists. I’m wondering if the art of our era is more subject to decay.

CG: Being influenced by art writing and publicity?

RRB: Just by popular taste or something. Whether these people (the critics) need to be here because it’s harder to make good art these days.

CG: I don’t think so. I think there’s more promising young art around now than there was 30 years ago.

RRB: I’m talking about a couple hundred years ago.

CG: You can’t go back beyond the late eighteenth century. When Baudelaire and Flaubert (and, in his day, the English art critic Haskell [?]) were talking about decadence, they were marking the first time ever in the Western tradition that the best new art was being turned down at first. Its a fact that even Ingres and Delacroix got accepted pretty early, as controversial as they were. Delacroix got commissions before he was middle-aged. And so did Ingres, certainly. In the 1840s, 1850s, that’s when artists began howling against the bourgeoisie.

RRB: Do you think because of this maybe critics do count more now?

CG: I can’t answer that. If you make noise about an artist, it finally penetrates. But I think Pollock’s reputation would have risen as it did after his death in any case, without my beating the drum. I think so far the best work has emerged eventually. It’s taken more time over the last hundred-odd years than before. But in the end it [wins] out. Just think of Cézanne, how obscure he was most of his life, right to the end. He had a small circle of admirers in France. He was unheard-of outside [France].

RRB: He got support from his peers I guess.

CG: A circle of admirers and that was it. A pretty good painter, a French painter known world-wide in the early 1900s – he died at half Cézanne’s age ad almost at the same time – was Carrière. The Museum of Modern Art a while ago even bought a Carrière. But, take Carrière, a minor artist – as good as he was. And there he was. He was known in New York in 1900 and nobody had heard of Cézanne except maybe one or two people who’d been abroad.

RRB: What is the importance of high art. What does great art do? Does it improve people morally?

CG: I don’t think so. It’s a value in its own right. It’s an ultimate value. It’s prized for itself. It’s not a supreme value. That’s the mistake the “art for art’s sake” people make. But it’s something desirable for its own sake – the experiencing of it. Not because it improves you.

RHB: You mean it’s purely sensorial?

CG: No, we won’t talk about what the aesthetic experience consists of. It’s something that’s of value in its own right.

RHB: It’s intrinsically satisfying.

CG: Intrinsically. Whether it’s Shakespeare or whether it’s Beethoven or whether it’s Titian. It’s an ultimate end, an end in itself. But not a supreme end.

RRB: What things would you put in that category?

CG: Supreme… Human life. Human beings.

This is the concluding installment of “A Conversation with Clement Greenberg.”