Greenberg after Duchamp: post-modernism and the meaning of medium specificity

From the late 1930s through the ’50s, Clement Greenberg was an incredibly prolific critic whose ekphrastic writing entails an attentiveness to artworks which is rarely seen today. However, he became wholly identified with his more schematic theoretical essays, particularly “Modernist Painting” (1960), written for radio broadcast by Voice of America, and those collected under the headings “Culture in General” and “Art in General” in his Art and Culture, the 1961 book of collected essays which solidified his status as the hegemonic interpreter of late modernism in painting and precipitated the Oedipal efforts of the next generation of critics. This next generation made the case that the lens through which Greenberg understood art was outdated and inflexibly narrow, contending that his critical paradigm, ostensibly preoccupied as it was with medium-specificity, was simply insufficient to understand works engaged in the fraying of disciplinary boundaries, the proliferation of happenings, performance and conceptual art, and the production of “texts.”

By the time of the emergence of such postmodern art, Greenberg was no longer explicitly championing art which concerned itself with medium-specificity. Indeed, throughout
the ’60s he had paid little heed to the Minimalists’ efforts to intentionally interrogate the ontological limits of mediums. Nevertheless, it was certainly the case that
Greenberg was overwhelmingly dismissive of postmodernism. In this article, however, it is argued that it is wrong simply to characterize this in terms of Greenberg’s championing
of a purity which was undermined by art that turned its focus to extra-aesthetic concerns. Instead, this article shows that it might be chalked up to what is effectively an act of misrecognition on Greenberg’s part. It is argued that it is possible to claim that, by Greenberg’s own lights, postmodernism does not fall foul of Greenberg’s criticism, and in fact might be characterized as a continuation by other means of that which met with Greenberg’s acclaim in modernism.