BECKY BIVENS: Formal Feelings and Automatic Affects: Formalism and Surrealism in Clement Greenberg’s Art Criticism
March 22, 2019
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Today, Clement Greenberg’s name is often evoked to demonstrate old ideas that we have come to reject. If we argue that presumptions of aesthetic “value” reflect unjust social relations, he insisted that some artworks are better than others; if we blur the boundaries between specific artistic media, he insisted on strong categorical distinctions. This talk looks at Greenberg’s writings on surrealist painting and modernist abstraction in order to suggest that the contemporary tendency towards refusing categories and aesthetic value has not been as productive as we usually suppose. Greenberg’s writings show that we need categories and values to explain the public-facing significance of our emotions—especially our emotional responses to works of art.
Becky Bivens is a PhD Candidate in the Art History Department at UIC. Her research focuses on mid-century American abstract art and criticism and aesthetic theory. Bivens’ dissertation, “Formal Feelings and Automatic Affects: Formalism and Surrealism in Mid-century Art Criticism,” theorizes emotion in the art criticism of Wolfgang Paalen, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard, and Rosalind Krauss.
Image: Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943
Date posted
Mar 5, 2019
Date updated
Mar 19, 2019