Homemade Esthetics

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 maintains - despite the attempts of some artists from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judgedthat 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 and the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenberg's 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 critic's mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories.