Medium-specificity as determinate negation: why Greenberg was right in practice but (somewhat) wrong in theory

Whether through the general argument that Clement Greenberg’s critical paradigm was insufficient to understand so-called postmodern art; the further contention that, in fact, Greenberg had always missed what was most decisive in the work of artists he championed (Krauss on Pollock); or simply through historicization which sought to locate Greenberg's criticism as relevant only to its specific epochal conjuncture (T.J. Clark and his student John O'Brian), in the ‘70s and ‘80s a generation of art critics made the case that the lens through which Greenberg understood art was outdated and inflexibly narrow.

Admittedly, contemporaneously with the rise of postmodern art, Greenberg's writing began to conform to his critics' characterisation of it (although not to the extent that he endorsed art which most crudely 'illustrated' its medium-specificity, as evidenced by his dismissal of the minimalists). Nevertheless, I want to argue that postmodernism has become so easily canonised as simply another stage in 20th century art rather than the historic gravedigger of (Greenbergian) modernism, because the latter was never the approbation of purity which could be undermined by art and criticism whose focus was turned to extra-aesthetic or non-medium-specific concerns. Instead, modernism is the term for a moment when art's emancipation from aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage made evident its transhistorical (at least under the contingent hegemony of capitalism, since the latter's rise confluent with easel painting) dialectic, whereby reified, conventional forms are determinately negated, which is a dynamic which persisted as the fulcrum of so-called postmodern art, and continues in art today.