The Design Turn

In the mid-twentieth century, whingy American art critic Clement Greenberg went around espousing the importance of “medium specificity” in art. In his best-known essay, “Modernist Painting” (1961), he argued that each medium had a formal characteristic that should be focussed on and not be used by other mediums. As a canvas is flat, painting needed to emphasise its flatness. The use of illusion in painting invoked three-dimensionality, which Greenberg asserted was the defining characteristic of sculpture and so bad in painting. Earlier, in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) Greenberg had suggested that if art did not maintain medium specificity it would devolve into kitsch, which he considered a dangerous by-product of industrialisation, a historical process that he closely associated with the political manipulation of the “urbanised masses” by capitalists, fascists, and communists. Kitsch was defined by profit, entertainment, and mass appeal rather than the aesthetic ideals of art. Kitsch was, for Greenberg, the opposite of art.