Art and Culture by Clement Greenberg (review)

Books 79 The first statement to be made about this book (after acknowledging its solid virtues, because further comments follow from it) is that its misnomer could have been avoided by using the subtitle for its main title. Freud, as Spector acknowledges, did not work out an aesthetic. As understood by students of the discipline, an aesthetic consists of the analysis of four terms, each in itself and all in their interrelationships. They are the aesthetic object; the artist, if the former is a made object; the observer, or however we call the person interested in the object, and the culture in which these three terms function. What the reader will find in the book is a sympathetic yet critical account of some psychoanalytic theories that Freudians believe throw light on art. For instance, among others, there are Freud’s discussions of the relation of dreaming to art and to ‘reality’, the role of sublimation in art and the relation of art to sex. By stating it several times, in various ways, Spector supplies the reader with ample evidence of something that many aestheticians have known all along, namely that ‘Freud avoided most aesthetic questions’. It would have been more precise, although a harsher judgment, to assert that, because of his sustained, almost exclusive and narrow focus on the psyche in preference to the made object of aesthetic presentation, Freud had a radically faulty understanding of art. This is not intended to deny that some o f Freud’s theories about how the human mind works illumine a number of problems of aesthetics, particularly genetic questions and depth meanings that may even escape the artist’s awareness. For this reason, although the book is happily free from the kind of guerrilla warfare that frequently sours discussions of the comparative value of Freud’s doctrines to those of his dissident offspring, the professional aesthetician will not find in this book startling discoveries that will enrich his knowledge. It is true that Freud was interested in art, or more exactly in what he took to be art, and that he collected a small private museum. It is also true that he advanced a theory of the function of art and of the psychic processes that he took to account for artistic expression; it is also true that those who are acquainted with Freudian theory are able to perceive symbolic meanings in art objects that those ignorant of it fail to notice. This holds, of course, for knowledge of depth psychology in general. But Freud’s contributions, valuable as they are, not only do not constitute a complete aesthetics but worse, they give evidence of his defective conception of art, of man’s relation to it and of the low value he placed on art as art, because of his failure to notice the constitutive role it plays in the creation of culture, If a book on ‘The Aesthetics of Freud’ can be written, the reason, in the last analysis, is that the writer takes for granted that the term ‘aesthetics’ has an unlimited coefficientof elasticity and isprodigiouslypolysemous. Freud‘s views on art leave much to be desired. His notions of the creative process are incomplete and in an important sense, incoherent (because ‘before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms’). His interest in art centers exclusivelyon its alleged ‘content’ considered in conceptual or abstract terms and oriented towards its genetic sources in the maker, thus leading to an erroneous appreciation of its value. Furthermore, it tends constantly to reduce aesthetic to non-aesthetic drives and to conceive of these in a simplistic way as essentially and solely erotic. But the most destructive defect of Freud’s conception of art (duly noted by Spector) was his ‘indifference’ (which I prefer to call his ignorance) to the ineradicable connection of the aesthetic object with technique, medium and form. Such ignorance leads quite naturally to the treatment of art objects as documents, particularly as diagnostic evidence , and to the factitious problem of the relationship of the creative mind to neurosis. So far as my reading goes, I do not find in Freud even a hint that he was aware...