Quotes from Clement Greenberg

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it.

Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.

Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.

You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

If you want to change your art, change your habits.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say, 'because,' you get into art jargon.

One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare.

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations…. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles, and what counts first and last in art is quality; all other things are secondary.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.