Clement Greenberg
To the Editors:
Clement Greenberg once observed that critics of his writing tended to read more into themselves than into his articles. Hilton Kramer’s rebuttal of my introduction to volumes 3 and 4 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, “Clement Greenberg and the Cold War” (March 1993), seems to entail a similar kind of inverted reading. Mr. Kramer accuses me of reducing “every aesthetic idea, if not aesthetics itself, to a suspect political datum” and of adopting a “belligerent voice” in my analysis of Greenberg’s shifting critical position in the 1950s and 1960s.
I do not deny that politics play a role in my deliberations about art. But I wonder if politics do not excite more interest on Mr. Kramer’s part than on mine. I invite readers to examine my introduction and to compare it with Mr. Kramer’s review. In which piece is the fixation on politics greater? And in which, by the way, is the tone of voice adopted the more immoderate?
John O’Brian
Department of Fine Arts
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Hilton Kramer replies:
John O’Brian is being disingenuous in attempting to change the subject, which is what he wrote about Clement Greenberg in his introduction to volumes 3 and 4 of The Collected Essays and Criticismand whether for political purposes it misrepresented Mr. Greenberg’s views. The best comment on this question is Mr. Greenberg’s. In an interview with Peter Plagens