Was Michelangelo too Slick...and too arty? Clement Greenberg's thoughts

Complete Interview with Clement Greenberg 

From a 1991 Interview with Clement Greenberg:

The trouble with Michelangelo's sculpture is that it's too slick. He was damned good, but he was too arty. He introduced artiness, and I could have said -- that wouldn't have been talking precisely about Michelangelo -- that European sculpture began to slope downhill after Donatello (who was a better sculptor than Michelangelo). After Michelangelo there was Giambologna, who was ok, and the famous sculptors who came after: Canova, Thorvaldsen in the early l9th century...

Rodin began it all over again -- somewhat. Rodin, Maillol, Despiau. Kolbe in Germany. And then of course there was the great rebirth of sculpture with Picasso's 1913 construction "The Guitar" in the Museum of Modern Art that started sculpture on a new trajectory. OK, let's look at famous Michelangelo. The best Michelangelo I've seen are the unfinished 'slaves' in the Borgo. They're the best. In order to be good as a sculptor, Michelangelo had to leave things unfinished. And they're still not as good as Donatello.

A 20th Century Art Movement - Another "ism"

Vorticism


A radical English art movement, led by Wyndham Lewis and named by the poet Ezra Pound in 1914. Lewis, EdwarWadsworth Gaudier-Brzeska and others exhibited together in Brighton in 1913, presenting their work as and in 'The Cubist Room'. In 1914 they published their first polemical year-book, BLAST and in 1915 they showed in London the Vorticist Exhibition which included several large paintings that are now lost. Essentially urban in its taste for hard, clear forms, Vorticism expressed great impatience with all Victorianism and all revivalism and sought to out-do the Post-Impressionist and Fauve modernism propagated by Roger Fry and his friends. Lewis met his associates when working in Fry's Omega Workshops; leaving with them after a disagreement with Fry, he adopted the vehemence and rhetoric of the Futurists in his onslaughts on Fry and made the Futurists' attempt to embrace industrial dynamism as the central concern of their art the concern also of Vorticism. Nevinson joined the group in 1913 but was the only one to call himself a Futurist. and Bomberg exhibited with them but did not become Vorticists. Though the war seemed an apt echo for their initially openly aggressive style and rhetoric - the subjects they used were neither necessarily aggressive nor even modern, though they shunned the French tendency to nudes, still lifes, domestic interiors and landscapes, preferring actions, even if the sources were classical antiquity or the Bible, rendered in varying degrees of abstraction — only Nevinson used his Vorticist art to make powerful images of it. The war and its aftermath also broke the group up and found alternative pursuits for its members. There is no exact end date for the movement. The June 1915 Vorticist Exhibition was the only one they put on, and the second and last came out in July 1915. That, in effect, was the end of Vorticist group activity.

Robert Motherwell Interview

Robert Motherwell Interview

Mondrian and Universal Aesthetics

Piet Mondrian claimed that there were universal aesthetic laws that good art would demonstrate.  Now that we live in the age of the null hypothesis, "scientists" have tried to test his theories.  Here's an example:


Can Mondrian's aesthetic claims be proven empirically?

Review of Hugging the Shore by John Updike

Review: Hugging the shore

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews

It's entirely possible that history's choice for the finest literary critic to find steady exposure in the pages of the New Yorker will not be Edmund Wilson--but rather John Updike, who here gathers over 100 reviews and essays from recent years. The years go by and he simply gets better: the style is astonishingly fluid without hurry; he never relaxes with pen in hand; he grows less sentimental, more minutely discriminating. Old enthusiasms taken on a finished, reflective patina--as in the essays on Nabokov, toward whom Updike is no less admiring now, but with more awareness of a narcissism at work, hollowing out the center of Nabokov's art. (Updike sees this as Saul Bellow's problem too.) And, if the critical breathiness of some of Updike's early appreciations has been reined in, there's been a compensatory opening-up to thoroughness: in order to study Vonnegut without patronization, Updike reads and discusses every single book; Muriel Spark, Queneau, Grass, and Calvino receive the same magisterial overview. Not too surprisingly, then, Updike's favorite sort of fiction strains--like his own novels and criticism--to make things plain, to bring things to light. (""The narrow skin of sensation just this side of darkness if where [Henry] Green's writing lies."") Likewise, a piece on Roland Barthes highlights Updike's innate distrust for methodology's short cuts, his belief in a certain sort of redemptive hard work, a grace of excess...  http://books.google.com/books?id=BsNFPgAACAAJ&sitesec=reviews Read the rest

Kandinsky on Art

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

But is it art?

Regarding Art in the Dictionary of Philosophy at Stanford