ABSTRACT
Greenberg and Fried make what they claim is their ‘immediate’, ‘intuitive’, ‘undeliberate’, and ‘involuntary’ experiential encounter with modern paintings the crucible of aesthetic judgement. Yet both tacitly acknowledge, as I showed in my Introduction, that what goes into this experience, and what comes out of it, is not finally separable from a whole world of other experiences, values, and interests bound up with such judgements. Greenberg signals, too, that the process of aesthetic evaluation is inevitably partly retrospective when he remarks that critics don’t just look and judge, but go on to reflect intellectually upon their experiences of looking and judging. A parallel self-consciousness, Fried asserts, had become the object of modern painting: Manet paints his relationship to the world – including his relationship to painting – and therefore his paintings, like art writing alert to this development, are themselves kinds of criticism: pictorial criticisms of looking, painting, thinking, and the wider world1 [Plate 1]. ‘Ambitious’ painting and its similarly ambitious sympathetic criticism become evermore closely bound up together in the twentieth century – even forming sometimes what Clark calls a ‘collaboration’ – in which the critical writing up to the job, as Fried suggests, is perhaps only a little less important than the paintings themselves.
