Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste

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Oxford University Press, 19.10.2000 - 256 Seiten
Thanks to his unsurpassed eye and his fearless willingness to take a stand, Clement Greenberg (1909 1994) became one of the giants of 20th century art criticism a writer who set the terms of critical discourse from the moment he burst onto the scene with his seminal essays Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) and Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940). In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington in 1971, Greenberg provides his most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art, arguing for an esthetic that flies in the face of current art world fashions. Greenberg insists despite the attempts from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged that taste is inexorable. He argues that standards of quality in art, the artist's responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic's responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. The obsession with innovation the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenbergs view, to the boringness of so much avant garde art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us particularly in the transcribed seminar sessions, never before published to watch the critics mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories. His views, often controversial, are the record of a lifetime of looking at and thinking about art as intensely as anyone ever has.

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Ausgewählte Seiten

Inhalt

The Bennington College Seminars April 622 1971
77
Appendix
196
Further Reading
204
Index
209
Urheberrecht

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Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen

Beliebte Passagen

Seite 93 - APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Seite 20 - Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Happily, when I shall wed, That Lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty: Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.
Seite xvi - The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself— not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.
Seite xvi - It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium.
Seite 74 - Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.
Seite 93 - APRIL, April, Laugh thy girlish laughter; Then, the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears! April, that mine ears Like a lover greetest, If I tell thee, sweetest, All my hopes and fears, April, April, Laugh thy golden laughter, But, the moment after, Weep thy golden tears!
Seite 56 - You could create, act, move, gesticulate, talk in a kind of vacuum — the vacuum itself being more 'interesting,' or at least counting for more, than anything that happened inside it. The gist of consorting with art was to be intrigued, taken aback, given something to talk about, and so forth. Yet Duchamp and his sub-tradition have demonstrated, as nothing did before, how omnipresent art can be, all the things it can be without ceasing to be art. And what an unexceptional, unhonorific status art...
Seite 63 - Esthetics is the science of ideals, or of that which is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason. I am not well acquainted with this science ; but it ought to repose on phenomenology. Ethics, or the science of right and wrong, must appeal to Esthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum.
Seite xvi - Purity" meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.
Seite 3 - the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process'.

Autoren-Profil (2000)

Clement Greenberg's books include Art and Culture and four volumes of collected essays and criticism. Charles T. Harrison of the Open University, co editor of Art in Theory 1900 1990 and one of the leading writers on modernism, has written an introduction placing Homemade Esthetics in the context of Greenbergs work and the evolution of 20th century critism.

Bibliografische Informationen