Modernism and Formalism

Abstract

Abstract With Chapter 1’s reconstruction of the internal structure of Greenbergian theory in place, Chapter 2 provides a critique of each wing of his theory in turn. With respect to Greenberg’s formalism, the author takes issue with his understanding of the ‘objectivity’ of aesthetic judgement and his notion of aesthetic ‘distance’, and brings out the incompatibility of both with Kant’s aesthetics, turning on Kant’s conception of ‘subjective universality’ and ‘disinterest’, respectively. With respect to Greenberg’s modernism, the author questions his conviction that the arts can be parsed on non-question-begging grounds, either in terms of medium or the sensory modality through which they are intuited. For this is to assume that the arts are separate in principle simply because they have to date been (largely) separate in practice, an assumption that is put in doubt by the conflicted place of modernist sculpture within Greenberg’s own division of the arts. Despite his medium-specificity, Greenberg’s account of modernist history required him to provide a broadly pictorial defence of modernist sculpture’s value as art.