# Quote — Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture

> Perhaps the greatest change that industrialism (along with Protestantism and rationalism) has made in daily life is to separate work from leisure in a radical and almost absolute way. Once the efficacy of work began to be more clearly and fully appreciated, work had to become more efficacious in itself — that is, more efficient. To this end, it had to be more sharply separated from everything that was not work; it had to be made more concentratedly and purely itself — in attitude, in method and, above all, in time. Moreover, under the rule of efficiency, seriously purposeful activity in general tended to become assimilated to work. The effect of all this has been to reduce leisure to an occasion more exclusively of passivity, to a breathing spell and interlude; it has become something peripheral.

- 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/perhaps-the-greatest

## 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)