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I have no quarrel with Greenberg's art criticism. He destested so-called "postmodernist" art for the kitsch it is. Abstract Expressionism is about the individuation of the artist. Something that is anathema to communism. Integral to that process of true individuation, although, is the shedding of one's "false" self-identity, to be sure, and I suppose that's where Clement Greenberg connects it to communism. Greenberg, like Picasso, just saw communism as a way to a possible utopia. Of course, both incredible thinkers were still terribly wrong on that count.
The problem with postmodernist theory comes in when young artists are convinced through postmodernist horseshit that the entire artistic universe available to them isn't available anymore because it's been already done before. So, they set out to do something absurdist because it fits in with this "postmodernism" garbage. Why do you think so much terrible art is being made today? This is exactly the reason. Well, this and an abundance of lack of talent among established artists, emerging artists, and just about everyone else who tries to make art.
Artists that add their name to their respective artistic canons throughout history have always borrowed from the past and gained inclusion into the canon by paying the appropriate homage to the past that the current time demands and by also adding some novel element that progresses the art forward.
case in point: Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh, as we know, is the A-number one king daddy in today's art market. His works fetch the highest prices. He's widely recognized as a visionary genius. And he is.
But, with Van Gogh, or with any artist, one can deconstruct the work with a critical eye and see the influences/. For Van Gogh, it was the work of Millet. And he copies Millet in his early work in his very crude way. He finally flowers later on after coming into contact with his contemporaries: Gauguin, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. which he also apes in his own way.
Moreover, his meager collection of Japanese wood-block prints were an instrumental inspiration to his art. Van Gogh's work helped to bring over to the Western world an Eastern conception of negative space and pictorial composition.
I've just enumerated many ways in which Van Gogh isn't original, yet he's regarded as a visionary genius.
And I do think he is a visionary genius, but I'm just trying to make a point here.
By this point, I surely do hope that I have made it abundantly clear what "postmodernism" is truly about. As the speed of information and technology has progressed, we have simply sucked the mystery (and hence the symbolic meaning) out of everything.
Again:
The whole philosophy of postmodernism (as opposed to modernism) is merely a case of the lunatics running the asylum and is all a bunch of doublespeak bullshit because the critics ran out of words to creatively describe art. The rise of conceptualist art in the late '60s-early '70s threw them for a loop, you see; some called it "neo-dadism" at first. At any rate, Duchamp was crowned in effect by these esoteric snobs as art's last true visionary. And it was decided that everything after Duchamp is merely a kitschy hodgepodge of the art that came beforehand. And while this orientation often holds true, it still doesn't make it an absolute truth. It's really more of a guideline than a gospel.
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