# Quote — Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture

> 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.

- 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: 244
- 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/the-so-called-obscurity

## 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 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)

> Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

p. 146 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clement-greenberg/art-and-culture/complete-honesty-has.md)