Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning

From the 1940s until the late 1960s, formalist criticism functioned to appropriate modernist art to the market interests and conventional sensibilities of the art world. By its judgments of taste, it certified the worthiness of art objects for markets, facilitating processes of the reception of artworks as commodities. Tekiner explains how the formalist art criticism associated with Clement Greenberg function symbiotically with art marketers to uphold conservative agendas and to mask the progressive content intended by many modern artists who construe their transcendental subjects as signifiers of freedom, and their art works as expressions of liberated imagination during the stultifying conformism of postwar North America.