A process-relational sociology of art critics: Clement Greenberg’s Modernist theory and practice

A central theme of this article is the developing tension between art specialists and non-specialists as a function of complex, differentiated figurations. Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic revolutions is allied to Elias’s model of the relative autonomy of the artistic figurations within lengthening relations of interdependencies and shifting cognitive-emotional tension balances of feeling and reasoning and spontaneity and self-restraint. Within the sociology of art, the field positionings, power, interdependencies, language and habitus of art critics remain a relatively underdeveloped area of enquiry. Art critics function as ‘professional explicators’ in Bourdieu’s terms or ‘specialists in verbalisation’ in Elias’s to communicate standard-setting models of value and taste of specialists to non-specialists. Clement Greenberg emerged as a socially mobile oblate from a position of artworld outsider to hegemonic dominance as the leading notable of Modernist art criticism. The article examines the social conditions of possibility for Greenberg’s standard-setting codes as they came to be established and sustained by particular figurations of people (a self-conscious avant-garde) at particular times (late 1930s–1970s) and places (New York).

This article is also available as chapter 8 in The Sociological Review Monograph, July 2024, Revisiting Culture and Society: Towards a Politics of Social Transformation. Essays in Honour of Bridget Fowler, edited by A. Eldridge and A Smith. ISBN 9781036205768