# Quote — Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture

> Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor.The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

- Author: [Clement Greenberg](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg.md)
- Book: [Art and Culture](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg/art-and-culture.md)
- Page: 31
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clement_Greenberg#Art_and_Culture:_Critical_Essays,_(1961)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg/art-and-culture/once-efficiency-is-universally

## More from this book

> The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg/art-and-culture/the-main-trouble.md)

> The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

p. 244 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg/art-and-culture/the-so-called-obscurity.md)

> The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cézanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

p. 171 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg/art-and-culture/the-paradox-in-the.md)