Clement Greenberg

I'm posting a long quote from Clement Greenberg's essay "Counter-Avant-Garde" (1971) because I like the last line. He's speaking about conceptual art and "avant-gardist" art specifically.

"Art that realizes--and formalizes--itself in disregard of artistic expectations of any kind, or in response only to rudimentary ones, sinks to the level of that unformilzed and infinitely realizable, subacademic, sub-kitschig art--that subart which is yet art--whose ubiquitousness I called attention to earlier. This kind of art barely makes itself felt, barely differentiates itself, as art because it has so little capacity to move and elate you. Nor can any amount of phenomenal or configurational novelty increase this capacity in the absense of the control of informed expectations. Ironically enough, this very incapacity to move, or even interest you--except as a momentary apparition--has become the most prized, the most definitive feature of up-to-date art in the eyes of many art followers...

...But to adapt that saying of Horace's again: you may throw taste out by the most modern devices, but it will still come right back in. Tastefulness--abject good taste, academic taste, 'good design'--leaks back constantly into the furthest-out as well as the furthest-in reaches of the vaccuum of taste...

...The inexorability with which taste pursues is what avant-gardist art in its very latest phase is reacting to. It's as though conceptualist art in all its varieties were making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of subart--as though taste might not be able to follow that far down. And also as though boredom did not constitute an aesthetic judgement."

Greenberg, C. "Counter-Avant-Garde". 1971. reprinted in "Clement Greenberg Late Writings." Edited by Robert C. Morgan. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. pp. 17.