Clement Greenberg's late Homemade Aesthetics (circa 1971)--roughly the time of the Conceptual Art movement----rests upon upon the substantial body of his earlier work.

One of the assumption of this body of work was his claim about aesthetic judgments and the nature of taste. Greenberg held that taste was involuntary and intuitive in nature, and thus as incorrigible and objective. Involuntary means what we cannot help but do. "You no more choose to like or not like a given item of art than you choose to see the sun as bright or the night as dark," he claims in "Intuition and the Esthetic
Experience". The question to ask here is why are aesthetic judgments involuntary and objective, rather
than being governed by specific theories or individual preferences?

Though Greenberg saw judgments of taste as involuntary, he also saw them as capable of revision or improvement. He conceived of taste as a faculty that could be "developed" or "cultivated" through increasing exposure to art—both through a broadening of the range of experience and through repeated encounters with the same works— and through reflection upon what was seen (or heard, or read).

Another Greenberg assumption was to establish the virtues of the work he admired by reference to a specifically modernist tradition and to an inherited agenda of technical concerns and problems set by an existing canon of Modernist art—rather than, say, by reference to any topical concerns or socially critical values the work might be thought to express. It is first and foremost in terms of artists' evident engagement with modern artistic conventions that the critical virtues of their work appear to have been established for Greenberg.

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Posted by: Yusef Asabiyah | January 20, 2010 2:37 PM