Clement Greenberg was probably the single most influential art critic in the 20th. Particular he published 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch,' an essay which undertook an. Early essays such as “Avant-Garde and Kitsch ” (1939) and “Towards a New.

Contents • • • • • • • • • • Early life [ ] Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons.

Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. Greenberg attended, the Marquand School for Boys, then, graduating with an in 1930, cum laude,. After college, already as fluent in Yiddish as English since childhood, Greenberg Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. During the next few years, Greenberg travelled the U.S.

Working for his father's dry-goods business, but the work did not suit his inclinations, so he turned to working as a. Programma dlya sozdaniya birok etiketok torrent. Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that. In 1936, Greenberg took a series of jobs with the federal government, from Civil Service Administration, to the Veterans' Administration, and finally to the Appraisers' Division of the Customs Service in 1937. It was then that Greenberg began to write seriously, and soon after began getting published in a handful of small magazines and literary journals.

Avant Garde and Kitsch [ ] Though his first published essays dealt mainly with literature and theatre, art still held a powerful attraction for Greenberg, so in 1939, he made a sudden name as a visual art writer with possibly his most well-known and oft-quoted essay, ', first published in the journal. In this Marxist-influenced essay, Greenberg claimed that true art is a product of the Enlightenment's revolution of critical thinking, and as such resists and recoils from the degradation of culture in both mainstream capitalist and communist society, while acknowledging the paradox that, at the same time, the artist, dependent on the market or the state, remains inexorably attached 'by an umbilical cord of gold'. Kitsch, on the other hand, was the product of industrialization and the urbanization of the working class, a filler made for the consumption of the working class: a populace hungry for culture, but without the resources and education to enjoy cutting edge avant garde culture. Greenberg writes, Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.

Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.