Is

Paraphrasing a few of the main arguments made by renowned art critic/aesthetician Clement Greenberg in a lecture series at Bennington, Charles Harrison writes:

"What he did was to associate the 'far-out' art of the present with the academic art of the nineteenth century; to represent it as too safe, too easy, too immediately popular... given that the academic had come to represent itself in the forms of the 'far-out,' the response of the truly avant-garde was to cloak itself in a seeming conservatism..."

This is probably off the mark, but the jist of the quote above bears pretty strong similarties to some of the ideas that get thrown around on ILM on occasion. Do you find this view plausible, or do you think it suffers from overstretching the notion of the avant-garde (i.e. "Subtle is the new radical, mwahaha!")? One thing that troubles me: for whom are we to assume Greenberg considers "far-out" art or music to be too safe and too obvious?