4. Clement Greenberg’s Hatred Of Pop Art – 1960’s
Clement Greenberg’s antagonism towards ‘Postmodernist’ theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to become a target for critics who labelled him as “old fashioned”. As a champion of Abstract Expressionism Greenberg never published a single essay on the subject of Pop Art, and occasional remarks in interviews and texts in John O’Brian’s anthology of the critic’s writings suggest a definite disdain for the phenomenon. The American essayist and critic was no fan of mass culture, or of the “middlebrow” poetry and fiction published in journals like the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. Kitsch, in Greenberg’s sense of the word, popular culture denoted a watering down of modernist innovations, a pilfering of the high by the low. But Pop reversed this flow, suggesting a redemption of the low by the high, reflected in the absence of a sustained account of Pop Art by Clement Greenberg who saw it as ‘the trick of making it look just the same as the cheapest art looks, people like Lichtenstein and Warhol paint nice pictures – but it’s easy stuff…’