on bad art writing

One more Greenberg passage tonight, which gave me my laugh of the evening. Here he is complaining about what he sees as the low quality of most art writing in the early 1960’s when he writes these words:

“Things that would get expelled from other kinds of writing by laughter multiply and flourish in art writing. In a recent book on Polloch (by an Englishman) we read of his ‘attempt to disrupt the time flux and invoke a new contingency’; in a recent book on de Kooning (by an American) we read of colors that ‘erupt through the ceiling, coherent in their poetry of ambiguity’; in another book on Pollock (by an American) we read that one of Pollock’s paintings is a ‘scornful, technical masterpiece, like the Olympia of Manet… one of the most provocative images of our time, an abyss of glamour encroached upon a flood of innocence.’ (This, about a picture that Pollock himself considered a failure.)”