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Category Archives: greenberg

Graham’s thoughts on art and SR

03-Mar-13

Graham’s weighed in with a few thoughts on some of the SR/art conferences / speculative themes going on at the moment (of which one, D.U.S.T’s Weaponizing Speculation, is still going as I speak). I think he’s spot on of course, but what some readers may not know is that I have a 10,000 word essay [...]

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Homemade Philosophy: Bogost’s Carpentry and Greenberg

31-May-12

There’s a link there. There really is. Ok, granted Bogost’s Carpentry (as Bogost defines it in Alien Phenomenology and elsewhere) isn’t aesthetics per se – it’s more of an ontographic tool implemented for weaselling out and characterising the diversity of being. He’s right to differentiate carpentry from aesthetics in the broader sense: ‘doing’ carpentry by [...]

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Late Greenberg on Duchamp’s “Advanced Art” (a longer rant)

23-Apr-12

From the same seminar (No – 6) Convention and Innovation (1976) -(p. 49 in Homemade Aesthetics, 1999). Again when he refers to ‘advanced’ art – Greenberg is effectively having a go at pretty much everything inspired by the ‘theoretical demonstration’ of Duchamp. “Most of what I’ve just said is not new. but the emphasis I’ve [...]

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The late Greenberg on Duchamp

22-Apr-12

Here he is – in Seminar Six. “Yet Duchamp and his sub-tradition have demonstrated, as nothing did before, how omnipresent art can be, all the things it can be without ceasing to be art. And what an unexceptional, unhonorific status art as such—that is, aesthetic experience—really has. For this demonstration we can be grateful. But [...]

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“Why would you want to end your career like this?”

03-Feb-12

That’s what someone said to me earlier today, when I talked about the importance of Greenberg. Not unexpected of course – but it makes no sense to be ignorant about him. When I asked for the reason behind this opinion, the smug self-satisfaction of ‘you don’t understand’ and ‘we’re past this’ comes to the fore; [...]

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Greenberg’s Bogostian moment.

01-Sep-11

One of my favourite lines from Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982. Why is it Bogostian? It’s not something I have time to put into words, but notice the technicality of language Greenberg uses; procedure, operation, competence. “Modernism criticizes from the inside, through [...]

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Greenberg on Jackson Pollock

18-Aug-11

To give you an idea of how the man operated in interviews, here’s an Open University interview with Greenberg by T.J Clark in 1983. Most scholars in the arts detest Greenberg (and I cannot emphasise the word, ‘detest’ enough), on account of being overly fussy and elitist. But does this come through on the interview, [...]

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Harman on Greenberg

20-Jun-11

As is known, Graham has been blogging a good number of posts on Clement Greenberg. He mentions me on a couple of times, as in previous email correspondence, I have mentioned that – in my opinion – he is the most powerful, if not the greatest writer of the 20th Century. And yes I do [...]

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