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. (shrink)

El modernismo es una teoría de la relación del arte con su medio, y en ningún lugar se ve esto más claro que en el pensamiento de Clement Greenberg. Greenberg fue probablemente el crítico de arte más influyente del siglo xx, uno de los responsables del reconocimiento del impresionismo abstracto y de la pintura de campos de color, así como del desplazamiento del centro del mundo del arte desde París a Nueva York. Su práctica como crítico de arte estaba, además, (...) fundada en una ambiciosa teoría del modernismo artístico y, en particular, pictórico. “Towards a Newer Laocoön”, aparecido originalmente en 1940 y que se publica aquí por primera vez en español, forma parte del puñado de ensayos imprescindibles para comprender su pensamiento estético. (shrink)