Notebook 19 2015

This article revisits Tomáš Pospiszyl’s discussion of the split between the US and the Czechoslovak postwar modernisms as a difference between the views of two critics who dominated the American and the Czechoslovak art scenes, Clement Greenberg and Jindřich Chalupecký. Pospiszyl convincingly traces the evolution of American art to what has been called Greenberg’s “formalism”, and the developments on the Czechoslovak scene to Chalupecký’s ideas about art as part of social social interactions. Though the author of the article agrees with this analysis of Czechoslovak modernism as anti-formalist, he seeks to draw attention to the writings of the Czech literary theorist Jan Mukařovský, which were contemporaneous with Chalupecký’s and Greenberg’s – in particular Mukařovský’s 1944 lecture “The Essence of the Visual Arts”. The author provides a comparative analysis of Mukařovský and Greenberg, suggesting that the former was quite close to the latter’s “formalism”. This might seem incorrect, given that Mukařovský is considered to be a precursor of the semiotic theory of art, which is generally understood as antithetical to formalism. The solution, he argues, is to realize that Greenberg is subtler, hence not so “formalist” after all. At any rate, it turns out that in addition to Chalupecký’s “social” theory of art, Mukařovský had a more “formalist” alternative which – for well-known historical reasons – had no effect on the subsequent development of Czechoslovak modernism.

This essay discusses the Kantian interpretation of conceptual art, which emerged recently in debates about the status of conceptual art and other styles of neo-avantgarde art in aesthetics and art theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Its primary focus is the thesis Diarmuid Costello presented in his essay “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Th eory”. Costello sees the problem of the uncertain aesthetic status of conceptual art and the related divorce between art practice and aesthetic theory as a result of a misinterpretation of Kant made by the infl uential art critic Clement Greenberg and his concept of medium specifi city. Th e aim of this essay is to show that although Costello is right to see the theory of medium specifi city as the main diffi culty aesthetic theory has in accepting conceptual art, he is wrong to make Greenberg responsible for this difficulty. Th e essay seeks to demonstrate that the problem lies instead in the essentialist point of view, beyond the Greenbergian and formalist approaches to art.