Clement Greenberg's Theory in Art

Okay, I have a really hard time really understanding all of these readings. So what I am going to do is I am going to summarize about what I think these people are writing about. Okay, don't judge, here I go:

....well...for starters this guy (T.J. Clark) is writing about Clement Greenberg's article called "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Clark writes "It is not intended as some sort of revelation on my part that Greenberg's cultural theory was originally Marxist in its stresses and, indee, in its attitude to what constituted explanations in such matters." Clark main objective by writing this article is to "interpret and extrapolate from the texts, even at the risk of making their Marxism declare itself more stridently than the "young writer" seems to have wished." In his article he really doesn't go against or for what Greenberg says. Sometimes he goes against him, other times he merely explains Greenberg's idea more fully.

He also states that the context of Avant-Garde culture comes to be: " peculiar, indeed unique, reaction to a far from unprecendented cultural situation-to put it bluntly, the decadence of a society, the familiar weariness and confusion of a culture in its death throes."


*AliciA*