Clement Greenberg was born in New York in 1909 and graduated from Syracuse University in 1930. He has been an editor of both Partisan Review and Commentary, and was for some years the art critic for The Nation. The collection of his art criticism called Art & Culture, published in 1961, is generally regarded as a classic in its field. Two volumes of his writings on art, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 and Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, edited by John O’Brian, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 1986. Mr. Greenberg divides his time between New York City and a house in upstate New York.
The more I pondered these questions about New York the less I felt able to answer them usefully. Where I can offer something to the point—i.e., that the best painting and sculpture over here now seem to be being produced in the hinterland—I would have to qualify at length, and I simply don’t want to. So I’d say that much of the best art, not all of it, is being made outside New York, and then I’d name names and places. Again, I don’t want to. I just want to state what I think is a large fact and leave the details for some other occasion.
Yes, there are now important centers of artistic production away from New York—not large but important. This is as new for us as it would be for the