Greenberg on Kant and the Objectivity of Taste

Clement Greenberg, influential art critic and defender of the American avant-garde, famously defined Kant as “the first real Modernist”. Curiously, he struck a rather critical tone some years later when he dealt with the question of taste. In a short essay entitled Can Taste Be Objective? (1972), Greenberg claimed that Kant had not “satisfactorily” solved the problem of taste – namely the question of whether its verdicts are subjective or objective. Despite his casting Kant as a pioneer of modernism, this amounted to downplaying the importance of his aesthetics, given that Greenberg viewed the crucial problems associated with the experience of art as “problems” of taste – problems, he claimed, that “do seem to boil down to one in the end”, i.e. the question of taste’s objectivity. While Greenberg’s criticism is comprehensible, the paper shows that it is based on an understanding of the question of taste that differs from Kant’s: whereas for Greenberg this question is empirical, for Kant it is fundamentally normative. Furthermore, it hopes to show that in claiming that Kant failed to explain how his sensus communis can be invoked to settle disagreements of taste, Greenberg overlooks important aspects of Kant’s conception. Although the paper focuses on Greenberg’s objection to Kant’s views on taste, it also sketches his characterization of Kant as a pioneer of Modernism, as these provide a context for his reflections on the objectivity of taste.