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One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know — or are supposed to know — that results are all that count in art.

— Clement Greenberg Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

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More quotes by Clement Greenberg

Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

* the dividing line between the painterly and the linear [painting] is by no means a hard and fast one.

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view — the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961)

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

Modernist Painting (1960)

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Clement Greenberg (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.