Robert Jackon on my Greenberg posts

Robert’s thoughts are HERE.

Just as Robert says:

“The problem of course, is that whilst [Greenberg] is undoubtedly influential today and will continue to remain influential for a good while yet, his work is almost-always subject to the opposing side of influential hostility. Most critics of a young age, continue to single out Greenberg/Fried/Krauss as relics of a by-gone era of oppressive authority, elitist high standards, smugness and a ‘stuffy’ purity of form. Most do not remember Greenberg’s actual project, but the stuffy-ness of being enlightened through modernist critique.”

Right. But Robert hits the nail on the head in his very next sentence:

“If you believe his conclusions and not his words, then no wonder.”

More and more, I think this is the problem with most bad reading that misses the point, in whatever field. People are so fixated on whether or not they agree or disagree with an author’s conclusions. But pretty much the most important intellectual skill that exists is the ability to detect quality quite independently of whether or not you like that quality.

Likewise, you’ll quickly know you’re in a fruitless conversation if everyone is busy telling you that they agree or disagree with what you’re saying.

But just as I am suspicious of readers who cannot occasionally admire that which they dislike, I am equally suspicious of authors who appeal only or primarily to those who agree with their conclusions.

Heidegger was a Nazi, but he has plenty of admirers among communists, liberal democrats, and just about any other political group. Why? Because the intellectual quality of his work is so high that there’s no circumventing him.

Nietzsche was an elitist aristocrat and a misogynist, yet he inspires plenty of socialists and women. Why? Because the quality of his mind is at a very high level, whether you like the content of what he’s saying or not.

By the same token, Greenberg’s intellectual quality is such that it ought not to matter whether you “disagree” with his attempt to isolate artworks from surrounding social forces and so forth, or whether you find him to be an elitist. But perhaps it’s just a question of time. He may simply be too intertwined with controversial contemporary issues to get a fair hearing, just as it may be premature to figure out the true stature of Marx, just because so many positive and negative agendas are entangled with his name. (As for Greenberg, I was once at a lecture where an audience member described him as an “idiot,” which is quite simply false. Read him. He was brilliant well beyond common measure, and his achievements are especially remarkable considering that he was heavily self-taught.)

I am always rather skeptical of authors who are admired primarily by those who like and agree with their conclusions. That’s the same reason we like air conditioners: they are very useful on hot summer days.

Finally, it’s ironic that the charge of elitism should be made against Greenberg, who was basically a communist. The only sense in which he was an “elitist” was in the good sense: namely, he distinguished between high-quality and low-quality work. The fact that there will always be some disagreement about such assessments does not mean that the difference doesn’t exist.

We all make such “elitist” decisions constantly. You don’t eat just anything placed before you without deciding whether or not it’s wholesome and/or tasty. You don’t choose friends or mates at random. You don’t choose a career at random. Instead, you try to choose the best in every situation. The fact that my friends and I disagree on what is Chicago’s best restaurant does not mean that all restaurants are equal and that it’s “elitist” not to appreciate them all equally.