ABSTRACT
The effect of Clement Greenberg's progressive, problem-solving view of modern art is to destroy the popular stereotype of the avant-garde as a generator of the historical discontinuities, a self-starter, within a field of infinitely possible beginnings. The use of the term "aesthetic" from a formalist point of view is problematic because it covers what literature, music, and art have in common and the formalist imperative is toward separation and purification. Schiller regards the aesthetic as an autonomous realm of values, but this autonomy is not insulated from moral and political questions. The ambiguous development of the avant-garde is missed, for instance, by Richard Chase in his plausible account of the history of the avant-garde. A judgment of the formalist avant-garde cannot be made exclusively in terms of its own valuation of philistine culture or its obsessive need to cultivate exclusively the artistic medium.
