This is excellent, Jonathan. Lots to say. Susan Buck-Morss has a brilliant short piece in October’s 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” that might be useful for a future installment; she frames this problem well before the social media image-stream became our default condition.
I’ve also been circling something adjacent in a piece I recently started, on two 19-century paintings I first “discovered” online and now keep seeing recirculated in my Instagram feed—works that pull on my heartstrings, but which also raise (to me) the obvious questions about the impoverishment, or at least transformation, of aesthetic experience and how we talk about painting today. Your essay is very helpful for thinking through that tension.
P.S. On the Greenberg footnote: given your larger argument about the difficulty of recovering formal judgment, I wonder whether enough time has passed to read him again without simply inheriting the anti-Greenberg reflex. Much of the dismissal now feels secondhand—less an argument with Greenberg than with what he was made to stand for at the emergence of postmodernism. But postmodernism, too, is now eclipsing, and even Foster came out against his own thesis on the Anti-Aesthetic in Artforum. That should make it possible to return to Greenberg seriously, extensively, and on his own terms.
I think so. The "Collage" essay in particular seems to hold the whole argument within it. Lisa Florman wrote a great essay back in 2002 on how Greenberg's argument in collage is explicitly not a medium-specific one, even if it is a "flatness" one. But what Greenberg was dealing with there, and what Krauss and Bois deal with the Picasso and Braque symposium, is how to handle the burgeoning contradiction of literal and depicted space. Collage was Picasso's answer, and I think all of the problems presented by "postmodernism" are there in the collage essay (virtuality, image, allegory, etc.). "Collage" is an essay about the space of representation.
This is excellent, Jonathan. Lots to say. Susan Buck-Morss has a brilliant short piece in October’s 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” that might be useful for a future installment; she frames this problem well before the social media image-stream became our default condition.
I’ve also been circling something adjacent in a piece I recently started, on two 19-century paintings I first “discovered” online and now keep seeing recirculated in my Instagram feed—works that pull on my heartstrings, but which also raise (to me) the obvious questions about the impoverishment, or at least transformation, of aesthetic experience and how we talk about painting today. Your essay is very helpful for thinking through that tension.
P.S. On the Greenberg footnote: given your larger argument about the difficulty of recovering formal judgment, I wonder whether enough time has passed to read him again without simply inheriting the anti-Greenberg reflex. Much of the dismissal now feels secondhand—less an argument with Greenberg than with what he was made to stand for at the emergence of postmodernism. But postmodernism, too, is now eclipsing, and even Foster came out against his own thesis on the Anti-Aesthetic in Artforum. That should make it possible to return to Greenberg seriously, extensively, and on his own terms.
I think so. The "Collage" essay in particular seems to hold the whole argument within it. Lisa Florman wrote a great essay back in 2002 on how Greenberg's argument in collage is explicitly not a medium-specific one, even if it is a "flatness" one. But what Greenberg was dealing with there, and what Krauss and Bois deal with the Picasso and Braque symposium, is how to handle the burgeoning contradiction of literal and depicted space. Collage was Picasso's answer, and I think all of the problems presented by "postmodernism" are there in the collage essay (virtuality, image, allegory, etc.). "Collage" is an essay about the space of representation.