Saul Ostrow: To go back to "Modernist Painting," in terms of my reading of it, you assert that the job of the artist is to recognize the medium's limitations and paint despite them.

Clement Greenberg: I didn't proscribe or command--but if you want to make a painting, yes.

So after abstract expressionism, with the advent of post--painterly abstraction, intuition, like spontaneity and aesthetic experience, was considered arbitrary, not specific enough. There was a serious attempt to systematize production, deemphasize the subjective, and articulate the objective, and it's work that you didn't necessarily love. The real question is about your rejection of the work of the minimalists.

It's because their work was banal, uninspired. I think the minimalists just wanted to be far--out. The first pieces of the minimalists were influenced by Newman. They thought, "That's the answer, we'll do something like Barney does. He did it in painting, we'll do it in sculpture." They recognized that the development of modernist art, since Manet, went to the edge, and it seemed to them this was being far-out. For them, Barney Newman was far-out. That's taking a model, as it were. They got nothing in the end from being systematic. Systematized is when you start to go around the color wheels. You don't have much success when you go around the wheel.

Artists often do give themselves a rule--we give ourselves a rule without being aware of it consciously. For example, after the thirteenth century, you couldn't paint flat the way the Italian preprimitives did, pre--Giotto. You could no longer do that and reach the highest, you had to go with Giotto. Not that they did so well with Giotto; it took them awhile. So the strongest art became the most illusionist--pictorial art and sculpture too. And that lasted and held true until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then modernism gave itself a rule: we can't go into the illusion of the third dimension with that freedom we used to. That rule became more and more binding. It's what Picasso and Braque wrestled with.

Let me put it this way: as you know, given time, there usually is a direction in which the best art goes--not all the best art, necessarily, but most of it. It works out that way.

In one of your seventies essays you write about how art's history is created by trial and error, that it's not the straight line you just described, that it's got all these zigs and zags.

I have a tendency to say that it is a straight line.

Well, you draw a straight line through what you consider the high points, yet the line doesn't pass through dada, futurism, constructivism, and surrealism.

Yeah, that's the way it works out. It's a matter of record, not of principle. There's nothing wrong with those things by definition, but the practi-tioners aren't good enough. You can't say something is wrong, by definition, or less. They're not the high points. It's a matter of record, not of principle.

Let me try this out: the big difference between you and, let's say, Rosalind Krauss and her followers is that they are more interested in the idea of art than the experience of it.

Yeah, yeah, but they don't matter. In the long run, in a showdown, they don't matter.

Clem, was the group consisting of Michael Fried, Ken Moffett, Rosalind Krauss, you, and others ever formally composed? Did you get together and discuss issues among yourselves? Or was it just everyone for themselves? I mean, you were recognized as a circle supporting similar artists.

Yes, we were a circle, but it wasn't formal. We didn't sit down and decide to agree to support someone. Being programmatic was unthinkable.

So it was a group of people with kindred concerns?

And not all that much communication.

The reason I ask is because in "Artforum," when Krauss denounces formalism as being the product of a small--group mentality in which everything looks fine as long as you're talking with like--minded people, she made it sound as if you were all part of an organized group.

And she's breaking with us. I remember that. There was no group, there was just me. That's all there was--me. But you know Rosalind's a fraud. She was very facile, she writes well, but she's a fraud. People who were friendlier with her than me would say she was always asking what's the latest thing, the latest squeak?

One of the ironies is that she criticized you at the time, and then again recently, for being authoritarian and for having built a coterie, and yet she has done just that herself. She has built a circle around herself.

Oh, really? She has a coterie? I don't follow that.

Maybe we should end on this question: given your own position, can you imagine a moment of qualitative change, where one tradition comes to an end and a new tradition emerges?

I can conceive of it. Whether I can imagine it, I don't know. I can conceive of it, yes. You don't prescribe art, though you have to be ready for someone who comes along who's good, and I have to accept that. That's the categorical imperative.

In which case, why didn't you recognize it when you had won, that what you had supported had actually effected a qualitative change in the nature of art, rather than just quantitative change? Why didn't you recognize that the situation had changed, conditions had changed?

I had won? Well, had I won? David Smith, Pollock, and so forth, they were in a tradition. They had developed it, they hadn't changed it. They extended it. Say, Giotto is a turning point in art--he didn't change it. Well, he changed it, but he didn't wrench it. The intention of art, the best art, changes--that's part of the livingness of art, but it doesn't transform, it doesn't transform.

So, rather than transformation or anything like that, it's regenerative?

Whatever. You choose the word.