by Jorge Miguel Benitez
Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York.
Nature abhors inbreeding. Ideology thrives on it. The taboo against incest is not arbitrary. A cursory look at some European noble family demonstrates the dangers of endogamous degeneration. Without new blood, the concentration of recessive traits can result in abominations. The same holds true in the arts and humanities. Cross-cultural exchanges enrich the participants. Conversely, the absence of exchanges, and even appropriations, leads to intellectual and aesthetic incest. The result is a bouillon of provincial purity and sterility that destroys culture for the sake of ideology.
In the 1700s, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing paved the way for the critic and the art historian to be the final arbiters in art. Henceforth, the artist would be a servant of scholars who would determine what constituted art while interpreting the results for the audience. Notwithstanding the precedent set by Vasari in the 1500s, these German founders of art history and art criticism inadvertently set the stage for two centuries of pedantry in search of artistic purity. By the 1940s, the United States, with its penchant for black-and-white reductionism, would distill German notions of purity, progress, and aesthetic determinism into a poisonous elixir of rules and intolerance. Under the dictates of Clement Greenberg and his followers, modernist freedom became a straightjacket of restrictive theories. Any artist who deviated from the rules risked losing access to an increasingly lucrative New York art scene that dominated world markets after 1945.
Taking his cue from Lessing’s “Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” Greenberg wrote: “Guiding themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, by a notion of purity derived from the example of music, the avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its ‘legitimate’ boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy. Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.”1
For Greenberg, this meant that painting could not include representation or any literary allusions. Segregation was paramount. The arts could not mix or remotely influence one another. He preached purity with the same fervor that he espoused historically-mandated progress. He longed for a finale that would resolve the messiness of the human chronicle called history and failed to grasp that the “end of history” was nothing less than death. The same held true for purity. It was no accident that pop art followed abstract expressionism with a speed that defied the accusations of philistinism leveled against its practitioners and audience. Pure painting was powerful in small doses. But despite the often-pretentious titles, there was something oppressive about the purity of a Barnett Newman or an Ad Reinhardt that went beyond the artists’ claims of transcendence. The paintings were and remain impressive in a manner akin to Egyptian pyramids. They have a tomb-like quality, as if to say, “painting must die to save your aesthetic soul.” They preserve purity at the cost of humanity.
Greenberg incorrectly assumed that the public rejected non-representation. It never occurred to him that it intuitively rejected the inbred sterility of aesthetic fundamentalism. In the arts, the quest for purity leads to stagnation. In life, it leads to genocide. If an ethno-nationalist believes that diversity “poisons the blood of the nation,” then the artistic purist believes that contact with images, words, or symbols “poisons the sanctity of the piece.” The other, whether in life or art, must be deported or exterminated in order to preserve the virginal innocence of the people or the genre. Yet despite the longing for an unsullied utopia, the allure of the other persists with all the power of forbidden fruit. As Greenberg himself confessed in 1965: “Lest anybody misunderstand me and think that I myself hold a brief for pure or ‘formalistic’ painting as such, let me say that I wish it were otherwise. The actual record of its achievement is what alone makes the case and brief for pure painting or what’s called that. My own wishful preferences count for nothing here, or anywhere else in art. If it were up to me, the major painting of our time would go back to the Corot of the late 1830s and early 1840s—that is, to a species of photographic naturalism. If it were up to me the greatest art since Corot would have continued to be naturalistic. But art, and especially major art, keeps on evolving and changing; it makes itself known precisely by its never coming to terms with you, but instead, by always compelling you to come to terms with it.”2 Such are the words of a fanatic who believes in salvation through art but only through the intercession of the critics and their priesthood.
Unfortunately, “the actual record of its achievement” is a critical tautology. Who determines such a “record” or “achievement”? Is not the artist beneath the critic, the art historian, and the theoretician? The art is great because the critic says as much, and the critic is self-evidently and self-referentially right. As Marcel Duchamp understood, the greatness or insignificance of an artist has nothing to do with the artist or even the art. To that end he stated: “In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.”3
Duchamp, a champion and collector of surrealist painting, never bought into purity of any kind, especially if it crossed into a spiritual realm couched in secular progress. He expressed his Gallic skepticism when he said, “I’m afraid I’m an agnostic when it comes to art. I just don’t believe in it with all its mystical trimmings. As a drug it’s probably very useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as religion it’s not even as good as God.”4 In another interview he explained one of the reasons why art had no salvific value: “I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do. That is, it lives from the time it’s conceived or created, for some fifty or sixty years, it varies, and then the work dies. And that is when it becomes art history.”5
If, by his own admission, Greenberg preferred “naturalistic” art, then his fetishization of “progress” demanded that he advocate for the avant-garde and its self-proclaimed role as the revolutionary mover of history. Yet that self-proclaimed role, itself a messianic delusion, was destined to fail if it remained on Mount Olympus. Harold Rosenberg addressed the absurdity of the issue when he noted: “To be legitimate, a style in art must connect itself with a style outside of art, whether in palaces or dance halls or in the dreams of saints and courtesans.”6 Jazz, which Greenberg had dismissed as kitsch and the hyper-elitist Horkheimer and Adorno had labeled as capitalist exploitation by the “culture industry,”7 was seductively impure and thoroughly American. That impurity molded its genius. After all, it had been born in brothels, dance halls, Eastern European shtetls, Irish-American slums, and Southern cotton fields.
Jazz also defied the racism of an avant-garde whose Hegelian idealism and Viennese intellectualism served a Eurocentric agenda rooted in notions of Teutonic cultural superiority. Rosenberg understood this to a degree that Greenberg could not accept for fear of reconciling his personal preferences with the demands of history, a fiction concocted to justify the myth of forward motion. Progress was a Western prerogative, and only a Westerner could inculcate it into lesser peoples. It was heresy to suggest, as did Maurice Ravel, that jazz was worthy of emulation by classically trained Europeans.
By the 1960s, the issue was mostly moot. From Johns to Rauschenberg and Warhol to Lichtenstein, a new generation of artists, free from the pretensions of their self-important elders, rediscovered what the cubists, Dadaists, and surrealists had always known, namely, that words, images, symbols, and any number of other impurities could defile the pristine picture plane without summoning Satan or ending the world. Not until the twenty-first century would the obsession with purity return through the segregationist, tribalist, and provincial theories of identity politics. Regrettably, ideologically-inspired authoritarian impulses are never far from the surface in an art world that fears the freedom of impurity and refuses to learn from past dictatorships.
Works Cited
Antoine, Jean, “Interview with Marcel Duchamp,” The Art Newspaper, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/1993/04/01/interview-with-marcel-duchamp-life-is-a-game-life-is-art (accessed February 3, 2025).
Duchamp, Marcel, “The Creative Act,” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson: New York: Da Capo Press, 1989.
Greenberg, Clement, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, Volume 1, ed. John O’Brian: Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Greenberg, Clement, “Pop Art,” Artforum, October 2004.
Rosenberg, Harold, “Parable of American Painting,” The Tradition of the New: Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1994.
Tomkins, Calvin, “Marcel Duchamp,” The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde: Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1980.
1 Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, Volume 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 32.
2 Clement Greenberg, “Pop Art,” Artforum Oct. 2004: 55.
3 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 138.
4 Calvin Tomkins, “Marcel Duchamp,” in The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1980), 18-19.
5 Jean Antoine, “Interview with Marcel Duchamp,” The Art Newspaper, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/1993/04/01/interview-with-marcel-duchamp-life-is-a-game-life-is-art (accessed February 3, 2025).
6 Harold Rosenberg, “Parable of American Painting,” in The Tradition of the New (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1994), 16.
7 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 98.