I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. -Herman Melville, Moby Dick

In a way, the entire philosophical project can be looked in terms of the problem of language. Philosophers seek to define their terms and remain consistent to them in order to create meaning for their systems. As soon as one begins to speak about art, one is confronted with the problem of language. An essential component of the sublime is that it be ineffable. Since visual art is visual and appeals primarily to visual experience, it is difficult to fixate in linguistic terms. When reading criticism or reviews of art, or conducting discussions or critiques, it is important to know not only what the terminology at hand is, but what those terms mean to the speaker or author in question. We can only come to understand what people are saying about art through careful attention to the specific terminology they use. This is similar to the philosopher’s consistency of terms. In this paper I will attempt to navigate a paradigm shift that occurred in artistic discourse and production in the 1960's. In this effort I will demonstrate the specific terminology employed by Clement Greenberg, a prominent figure in 1960's art writing and how those terms inflected arguments and defined the stakes of the crisis. That is to say, by paying careful attention to what Greenberg was saying, I hope to demonstrate what the crisis of the 1960's was about and what the stakes and outcome of that crisis may be.

Critics and artists writing criticism are the major players in this crisis. My investigation will focus primarily on the Modernist critic Clement Greenberg. A careful study of his texts will show how he came to formulate a conception of Modernism. Greenberg's critical essays yield the terms on which his concept of Modernist art was founded. Once those terms are isolated, we will be able to see how the terms themselves led to a crisis in artistic practice. As his writing gained importance, certain artists, generally dubbed the Minimalists, hypostatized Greenberg's demands for Modernism, but Greenberg himself rejected their conclusions. This is essentially the crux of the crisis in question. I will turn to Thierry de Duve's essay The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas which provides a keen analysis and interpretation of the crisis of modernist painting.

De Duve demonstrates that opposing these critics are several artists who wrote in defense of their work. Here I will focus primarily on Donald Judd and Robert Morris. These two artists are often considered the primary Minimalists. Although their relationship was adversarial and their art was antagonistic and arrived at conflicting conclusions, Judd and Morris share a common effort to go beyond the Modernism championed by Greenberg. In this way, I will examine what the two share in their moves against Modernism and will not investigate the conflicting world-views their work embodies, which is a topic for another paper. Similarly I would like to look at the painting of Frank Stella which provides an interesting case study at the heart of the whole matter. His black, aluminum and copper paintings may have precipitated the crisis of modernist painting. Looking back today, this conflict and crisis may seem historicized or even irrelevant. But these people were fighting for what they believed. This provides an interesting format to explore an interesting historical problem. They were fighting for the very fate of art in their time and it mattered.

At this point, I have already opposed the terms Modernism and Minimalism. I will now investigate what Modernism meant for Greenberg and the terms with which he defined it over the course of several critical essays. Beginning with Avant-Garde and Kitsch of 1939, Greenberg defines modernism in historical terms. This essay traces the evolution of the avant- garde in nineteenth century France and its growth out of contemporary bourgeois society. Greenberg claims it to be the only true, living culture possible in the historical moment. Avant- Garde culture is defined as: A superior consciousness of history more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism made this possible. This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society.

The avant-garde project according to Greenberg therefore, is that the arts engage in an historical self-criticism in which art finds justification in itself. To do this, the avant-garde artists must withdraw from contemporary politics and economics in order to devote themselves exclusively to their crafts. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. In his next essay, Towards a Newer Laocoon of 1940, Greenberg makes the role and responsibility of the avant-garde artist more explicit. Tracing the history of art through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Greenberg demonstrates that a confusion of mediums existed in European art. Literature and the evolution of the novel became the dominant art-form in the culture during this period and all the other mediums sought to imitate, not themselves, but the effects of literature. Speaking of the degraded quality of 19th century academic painting he says:

[i]t was not realistic imitation in itself that did the damage so much as realistic illusion in the service of sentimental and declamatory literature. Here, neo-Raphealite mawkishness in England and Academic bravado in France come to mind. Enter the avant-garde.

Greenberg traces the history of 19th avant-garde painting from Courbet to Manet and on through the Impressionists (and by extension Neo-Impressionists) as a concerted effort to purge literature and subject matter from painting and to focus foremost on problems of the medium itself, including flatness and color. Music enters the equation. Music, according to Greenberg is a pure art. It is the only immediately sensuous art in that it is only material fact (sound waves organized in a certain order), without any meaning outside itself. Therefore:

The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized. For the visual arts the medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically.

The demand then, is for media-specificity in the arts. Where each art engages physical properties that are intrinsic to itself. The more physical a picture, the more visual it becomes:

Painting and sculpture can become more completely nothing but what they do; like functional architecture and the machine, they look what they do. The picture or statue exhausts itself in the visual sensation it produces. There is nothing to identify , connect or think about, but everything to feel. ... The painting and statue are machines to produce the emotion of plastic sight. 'The purely plastic or abstract qualities of the work of art are the only ones that count.

Here, a potential contradiction occurs. It is through the purely physical properties of the medium that the purely visual experience occurs. As we will see, this will have serious consequences down the road for Greenberg. Up to this point though, we have been able to define the avant-garde as an historically self-critical artistic practice which prioritizes investigation of the physical limitations of the medium itself. It is media-specificity above all else which determines avant-garde artistic production. In the visual arts, especially painting, this means focus on the plastic qualities of a picture. By extension, and in relation to music, plastic elements existing as ends in themselves and without external referent are abstract. This does not necessarily preclude representation of any kind, but it seems to Greenberg that the best way for painting to advance itself is through abstraction. This is not an eternal prescription, but rather a condition of the historical moment. Abstract art cannot be disposed of by a simple- minded evasion. Or by negation. We can only dispose of abstract art by assimilating it, by fighting our way through it. Where to? I do not know. We will soon see that the fight through abstract painting leads to the crisis of painting.

Flash forward to 1960 and Greenberg's seminal essay Modernist Painting . This work is a continued elaboration of the historical and aesthetic concerns of the previous essays we have examined, but in Modernist Painting , some of the terms have changed. This merits investigation so that the train of Greenberg's thinking is not lost. Foremost, avant-garde has been replaced by Modernism . Yet the conditions of Greenberg's Modernism are the same as those of the avant-garde. That is, historical self-consciousness and adherence to the purity of a medium in order to advance it further. The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it. As we have already seen in the avant-garde, Modernism seeks historical self-criticism and media specificity in order to better establish itself. Greenberg appeals to Kant's philosophy to show that while self-criticism may purge a discipline of elements that had previously been thought essential to it, what remains makes that discipline's area of competence even stronger. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium...Thus would each art be rendered pure 'and in its purity' find the guarantee of its standards of quality and independence. In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Greenberg demonstrated how 19th century painters used the pictorial conventions of their medium to purge painting of literature or narrative. Likewise, Greenberg uses Modernist Painting as a platform to attack sculpture in painting. Instead, it is the flatness of the picture surface that comes to the fore in Modernist paintings. With Manet and the Impressionists the question stopped being defined as one of color versus drawing, and became one of purely optical experience against optical experience as revised or modified by tactile associations. It was in the name of the purely and literally optical, not in the name of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to undermining shading and modeling and everything else in painting that seemed to connote the sculptural. So, if literature and sculpture have been purged from painting that which remains is flatness and color. It seems however that Greenberg already realizes the implications of his conception of Modernist painting. He addresses the problem that has been lurking in the shadows ever since he proposed the purely physical properties of painting as a function of purely optical experience in Towards a Newer Laocoon. That is, Greenberg realizes that if the optical is a function of the physical, what happens when a picture becomes totally physical, a monochrome, a flat object? In Modernist Painting he defends his position and attempts to find a way out:

The essential norms or conventions of painting are at the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture.

Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed and indicated. That is, if a painting were to become a total flatness, a monochrome for example, it would cease for Greenberg to be a picture and would be rather an arbitrary, generic object. A picture remains a picture, on the other hand, if it uses the physical dimensions of the medium to maintain optical illusion. And by extension, as a picture it remains art. The flatness towards which modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness. The heightened sensitivity to the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion or trompe-l'oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on the canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness, and the result of the marks made on it by an artist like Mondrian is still a kind of illusion that suggests a kind of third dimension. Only now it is a strictly a pictorial, strictly optical third dimension...The analogous illusion created by the Modernist painter can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literally or figuratively, only with the eye. (my italics) In this way, Greenberg demonstrates that while painting is physically flat, it must employ the physical properties of the medium itself such as line and color to maintain pictorial illusion which has been the domain and expertise of the art of painting in its entire, very-long history. To do this, Modernist painters have pushed art toward abstraction, where physical properties of the medium are employed without external referent. They proceed with the sole intention of making a picture more secure in itself and in the tradition of pictorial illusion. Perhaps seeking to ward off potential criticism, Greenberg attempts to show that this evolution and orientation toward flatness in Modernist painting was never a matter of dogma or program, but rather the natural result of artists working independently and personally in dedication to their craft.

That thorny problem of the monochrome, the generic, arbitrary object will not go away for Greenberg though. By the late 1950's and early 1960's artists who seemed to be operating along Modernist lines, employing the same historical and self-critical logic proposed by Greenberg, were in fact producing monochromatic or near-monochromatic paintings. Greenberg attempts to combat this in the last two essays we will examine. In After Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg traces the development of Modernist painting not from its nineteenth century beginnings, but from early cubism in Paris during the teens and twenties, then through the evolution of abstract painting in the thirties, to the development and subsequent mannerism of Abstract Expression in the forties and fifties in the United States. From there, Greenberg hedges his bets and endorses the artists he sees as carrying the torch of Modernism. Painterly abstraction is rejected as mannerism, especially among the followers of DeKooning. While he admits Jasper Johns may have some merit, Neo-Dada and other forms of Novelty are rejected for never getting past standard cubist strategies such as juxtaposition and collage. As we can see, Greenberg's tone and motivation are different in this text. He is defensive. Where before he was making historical justification for the development of past Modernist art, here he is making value judgements and rejecting not only individual artists, but entire movements and schools of art in his own time. At a crucial moment of the essay Greenberg uses his own logic of Modernism, as we saw in Modernist Painting, to introduce his new demand for painting: quality. And he does it precisely by attacking that persistent skeleton in the closet, the monochrome.

By now it has been established, it would seem, that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimination of flatness; and the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture: thus a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture thought not necessarily as a successful one. This would seem to indicate that Greenberg prescribes painting as flatness and its edge. But it is not quite that simple. We must remember that he wrote in Modernist Painting that flatness can never be absolute, that pictorial illusion must remain. In After Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg continues in a parenthetical aside attached to the above statement:

The paradoxical outcome of this reduction has been not to contract, but actually to expand the possibilities of the pictorial...

There remains therefore, for Greenberg, between flatness and its delimitation an infinite , or at least expanded, possibility for pictorial and optical invention. Robert Ryman, for instance, has made a career of permutations of all-white paintings. Greenberg champions Clifford Still, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko because they are the painters who have finally been able to advance past cubism, at the same time advancing pictorial art. Greenberg praises the way these artists have opened up color and used scale and shape to good effect. The exact choices of color, medium, size, shape, proportion including the size and shape of the support are what alone determines the quality of the result, and these choices depend solely on inspiration or conception. Quality itself then, Greenberg claims, is grounded in conception, innovation and originality on the part of the artist. Certain artists are favored for their ability to maintain adherence to Modernist demands for innovation and advancement of the medium, all the while respecting the limitations of the medium. Others are rejected as Novelty or Mannerism. Quality is achieved by finding new pictorial possibilities in the space between flatness and its delimitation.

It is not until Recentness of Sculpture of 1967 that the battle-lines have truly been drawn by Greenberg. Here, a discussion of contemporary sculpture begins, once again, with a look at the monochrome. Since the early 1950's Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein and others were showing monochrome paintings. His initial reaction was derision mixed with exasperation. But soon, the monochrome became conventional. A monochromatic flatness that could be seen as limited in extension and different from a wall henceforth automatically declared itself to be a picture, to be art. Here, Greenberg begins his attack on Minimalism. First, he situates the Minimalist work of Judd, Morris and Carl Andre in the realm of Novelty. He defines novelty as work that pursues the far-out as an end in itself. Assemblage, Pop, Environment, Op, Kinetic and Erotic are all swept under the rug of one-time novelty. But Greenberg reserves a certain guarded respect for Minimalism and the threat it poses to his vision of Modernism. Next, and symptomatic of his respect, Greenberg allows Minimalism a place in the long tradition of new, avant-garde art. Often, new art does not look enough like art upon initial reception. One need only think of the derision Manet, the Impressionists, the Fauves and so many others received when their work was new. They [the Minimalists] appear to have realized that the most original and furthest-out art of the last hundred years always arrived looking at first as though it had parted company with everything previously known as art. In other words, the furthest-out usually lay out on the borderline between art and non-art. In order to approach non-art the Minimalists then, were forced to work in the third dimension, because as Greenberg has already demonstrated, the monochrome itself is experienced as a picture and is safely tamed within the realm of art. Given that the initial look of non-art was no longer available to painting since even an unpainted canvas now stated itself to be a picture, the borderline between art and non-art had to be sought in the three-dimensional, where sculpture was, and where everything material that was not art also was. It is Minimalism's effort to attain the look of non-art that troubles Greenberg the most. Here, Greenberg gives his most impassioned condemnation of Minimalism and his most heart-felt appeal to his vision of art:

Minimal art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough anything else. Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered...There is hardly any aesthetic surprise in Minimal art, only a phenomenal one of the same order as in Novelty art, which is a one-time surprise. Aesthetic surprise hangs on forever it is still there in Raphael as it is in Pollock and ideas alone cannot achieve it. Aesthetic surprise comes from inspiration and sensibility as well as from being abreast of the artistic times.

At this point, it would seem that Greenberg sees the writing on the wall; that he is on the wrong side of history and that Minimalism is the way of the future. Or even worse, that it was his own Modernist aesthetics that opened the door and led the way for monochromy and Minimalism. A look to de Duve will soon show both to be true. But his appeal to inspiration and sensibility in the above passage also harkens back to the way Greenberg defined quality as a function of innovation and conception in After Abstract Expressionism. Aesthetic quality must remained grounded in its medium. In that essay he defended Newman, Still and Rothko. At the end of Recentness of Sculpture, Greenberg defends sculptors Anthony Caro and Anne Truitt and painters Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland, as if he is still hoping to find a way out of the bind he had written himself into. The continuing interest that Minimalism enjoys today is a testament to which side of this conflict was victorious in the end. But the passion, conviction and interest with which Greenberg wrote should not be belittled.

We have investigated how Greenberg's criticism evolved over the course of several of his canonical essays. We have been able to isolate and define some of the terms which are essential to his criticism. The avant-garde is historical self-consciousness and self-criticism. Modernism is defined as artistic practice that is conducted in terms of the historical self consciousness of the avant-garde. The goal of Modernism is purity. Purity is defined as media- specificity where each medium attempts to secure its area of competence to the exclusion of all others. Crisis occurs when painting, orienting itself toward its own flatness, approaches the condition of a monochrome or a blank canvas. That is, toward the condition of flat-sculpture (another medium), or even worse, toward the condition of a an arbitrary object, a thing (not-art). In 1959 Frank Stella exhibited a series of Black Paintings. Large-scale canvases on extra-thick stretchers were painted with black enamel stripes. Approximately a quarter of an inch of space is left between the two-inch stripes allowing the bare canvas to show through. In paintings such as The Marriage of Reason and Squalor or Die Fahne Hoch!, the painted bands echo the paintings'axial or bilateral symmetry and proceed from the center to the edge. The eye is stopped at the surface by the flat application of paint and then following the painted stripes, shunted to the edges. At the same time the ground of the canvas is inverted and becomes the figure of positive space left between the black stripes. In this way, Stella has achieved a perfect synthesis of the figure/ground problem in painting. At the same time, the blank space left between the concentric bands allows for a nominal reading of pictorial illusion. The extra-thick stretchers paradoxically help the painting to project into the room and seem less object-like and more pictorial, declaring themselves as paintings.

These Black Paintings successfully synthesize that which is painted on the surface with the external edge of the painting. They are super-flat, yet maintain a nominal pictorial illusion. One would think that these paintings would be the zenith of Modernist painting for Greenberg. They conform to every condition he has for media-specificity in painting. Instead, he rejected them. A look to Thierry de Duve's The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas, will help us understand why.

As we have seen in Greenberg's own writing, he is worried that if flatness is pushed too far a painting will cease to be a picture and become an arbitrary object. At the same time, Greenberg never gives prescriptive or theoretical demands but rather offers historical justification for developments he has identified. To accept Stella's Black Paintings, then would be to acknowledge the end of Modernism as Greenberg had conceived it. This is exactly what happened for the Minimalists. How could one remain an ambitious painter and progress past the monochromatic flatness of the Black Paintings ? As de Duve demonstrates, this is precisely the crux of the crisis of Modernism: They [the minimalists] must have felt that it was impossible to be a significant artist without being a painter and at the same time it was impossible to pursue modernist painting without going beyond the monochromatic literal flatness of Stella's black and aluminum paintings. At that point they would cease to be painters and would merely produce arbitrary objects. At that point, they would also have to break with Greenberg, lest Greenberg break with them first. That is, in reaction to Stella's Black Paintings one is forced to cease being a painter and become an artist. The specific traditions of painting and sculpture are abandoned for the generic quality, art. De Duve builds his investigation in terms of the relation of painting in particular to art in general.

De Duve begins with an investigation of the language used by Greenberg, much as we have done above. He identifies Modernism's orientation toward media-specificity and flatness through its history, as we have seen. De Duve introduces another concept in Greenberg's writing that I have only touched upon to this point; the importance, necessity even, of an aesthetic value judgement in the face of art. This makes up the second prong of Greenberg's thinking. De Duve identifies the arts'(i.e. painting or sculpture) orientation toward media-specificity as modernism. He in turn identifies aesthetic value judgement as formalism. [...]The conventions of a specific art such as painting are never a given. They are the momentary and fragile state of a consensus that is bound to be broken before it is reconstituted elsewhere. The individual work of art more precisely, its form embodies this call for a new consensus. Form is what translates into visual, describable appearance the state of the conventions of modernist painting as they are incorporated in a given work at a given moment in the history of painting. In other words, the form of a work is what makes its subject matter visible and offers access to its content or quality. On quality, Greenberg himself has said: The quality of a work of art inheres in its content, and vise versa. Quality is content. You know that a work of art has content because of its effect. The more direct denotation of effect is quality. In Modernist painting then, the subject matter of a painting is painting itself. Or more specifically the historical condition of painting at the specific historical moment it was painted. To do this the painter employs form, the physical properties of a work which human beings can see and talk about. The apperception of which leads to involuntary feeling which, positive or negative, entails aesthetic value judgement in terms of the work's quality as art. This logic has important implications. The two tendencies, modernism as an orientation toward flatness and media-specificity and formalism as aesthetic judgement, converge. Art, and good art, are defined as functions of their mediums. Historical familiarity with the conventions of a medium allow aesthetic judgement to occur. If it conforms to the conventions of the medium, then it's art, good or bad.

But what happens when painting approaches the conditions of the arbitrary object? As the monochrome or Stella's Black Paintings have done. In that case formalist aesthetic judgement is inverted. Once an unpainted canvas can be called a picture or a painting, then it is automatically called art. With the dismissal of the very last expendable convention of modernist painting that the canvas be painted at all the specific surrenders to the generic. Here, Greenberg and the artists face a fork in the road: Either (this would be the left branch of the alternative) the making and the appreciation of art require nothing but a mere identification predicated on the conceptual logic of modernism, and aesthetic judgement is no longer necessary; formalism would have to be betrayed; or (this would be the right branch of the alternative) aesthetic judgement is still necessary. But the pressure that the conventions of painting had put on its practice is now nil, and one is forced to allow for an art that is no longer the outcome its specific history. Modernism, this time, would have to be abandoned.

History shows us that the future of art lay on the left branch of the road. Donald Judd and the Minimalists, taking Stella's Black Paintings as a precedent, saw the only possibility to advance art was to go beyond painting into three dimensions. In this way, Judd out- greenberg's Greenberg. Following Greenberg's lead, Judd proposes an art that pursues the logic of Modernism even after that logic has met its end in the monochrome. At this point we enter into the realm of a generic art, an art that has neither history nor specific medium. Judd's specific objects follow a logic of Modernist painting, while his stacks and progressions project into architectural space. Robert Morris', work on the other hand, develops out of a logic of sculpture which comes to include the spatial environment in which objects exist and the gestalts (rather than specific images) those objects produce in the mind. Taking the extreme logic of modernism even further than the Minimalists, some artists abandoned objects and visual perception altogether. Joseph Kosuth's conceptual art reduces modernism to a linguistic proposition. Other artists such as Lawrence Weiner and the collective Art and Language pursued similar strategies. Kosuth's disavowal makes it clear that conceptual art was not a linear development from minimal art but an even more radical working of the aporia, born out of the question of the monochrome, that forced many artists who had been brought up on Greenbergian doctrine and who, with or without reason, felt that they could not possibly go on painting after Stella, to separate modernism and formalism and to bank on the logic of the former the better to refute the latter. If the discussion turns to conceptual art, one is never far away from Marcel Duchamp and the ready-made. Starting in 1914 Duchamp selected generic, commercially available objects such as a urinal or bottle rack and presented them, not as sculpture, but as art. Through a deft analysis, De Duve demonstrates that Duchamp's ready-mades are generic while the blank canvas which we have been discussing is a specific ready-made. It is grounded in an entire tradition and medium. For his part, Duchamp quit painting and started art; he jumped from the specific to the generic. Greenberg seeks to hold on to specificity. The blank canvas is where these two giants meet.

You may become an artist without being a painter, but hardly without having been one. As we have seen, this holds true for all minimal and conceptual artists. Fifty years after the readymade, they had to reenact a certain rite of passage, which Duchamp was the first to accomplish. Similarly, something minimal or conceptual beyond the blank canvas can be art without being a picture, but not without the blank canvas having been one which is why, ironically, the minimalists and the conceptualists sought their authority to do generic art from Greenberg's 1962 article [Modernist Painting], where he set out to posit the blank canvas as the embodiment of painting's ultimate specificity, as if warning not to transgress it.

In the course of this investigation I hope I have been able to demonstrate how Clement Greenberg's own language helped to precipitate a crisis of Modernism. Greenberg's conception of Modernism makes the monochrome possible and legitimate. It is the artists though, working themselves through Modernism and up to the monochrome who in turn must abandon Greenberg. Taking his logic even further than he could permit, they proceeded to create Minimalism, Conceptual Art and more. But De Duve demonstrates it is not as simple as that. More than a question of pre- and post-, Greenberg's ghost (and Duchamp's) is still with us. The art of today is still tied to the unresolved problems of the 1960's, the conflict of the specific and generic. Greenberg's nemesis, the blank canvas tacked to the wall, is at the crux of it all. An examination of this type can help to illuminate the specific things Greenberg said, rather than the all-too-common simple rejection of his name, and the crisis surrounding what he was saying. It is beyond the scope of this paper, however, to propose a resolution to that crisis.