Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning

Abstract

FROM THE 1940S UNTIL THE LATE 1960s, FORMALIST CRITICISM FUNCTIONED TO ap? propriate modernist art the market interests and conventional sensibilities of the art world. By its judgments of taste, it certified the worthiness of art objects for markets, facilitating processes of the reception of artworks as com? modities. It thus functioned symbiotically with art marketers. By its support of the market apparatus and its invalidation of social concerns as they are expressed through art, formalism upheld conservative agendas. Limiting its attentions form alone, it obscured the relationships of art social contexts and the socially critical implications of art. Formalism dominated art criticism in the United States during the postwar period, a time in which the center of gravity of the Western art world shifted from Paris New York, the U.S. experienced an economic boom, complacency char? acterized political life, and dissent was scarcely tolerated. The North American art critic Clement Greenberg was the leading prolocutor of formalism during this time. Many less prominent critics followed his lead. Greenberg's criticism, which was published mainly in Partisan Review, The Nation, and Commentary, carried on a European formalist tradition that was led in the early 20th century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Greenberg believed that the subjects of the visual arts should be their respective media. Painting should be about paint, and sculpture about the materials of sculpture. It follows that politics and narrative, as extraneous the art media, debase the purity of visual art. Formalists evaluate art according physical qualities such as color, size, shape, line, texture, and so on, and treat the ideational content of works as irrelevant. They view themselves as being mainly protectors and upholders of high aesthetic standards. Many art critics now favor contextual approaches. As nicely summarized by art historian Howard Risatti (1988: 31), such approaches seek to understand how art functions socially, economically, and politically in relation status and power and the construction of worldviews. Contextual approaches may be more capable of evading the collusions with market forces and conservative interests that marked formalism during the period of its hegemony. As Risatti points out,

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