Is "far-out" music too easy?

okay this:

"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...

seems way too vague to me, as a sentence. And if it means what I think it means, then it's way too general a statement, too. And when was this lecture? I know vaguely when Greenberg was around, but considering he lived a long time (I think), the art of the present could mean a whole slew of things.

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..."

If this is what I think it is, I'm not sure I agree with the basic premise here, either.

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!")?

I don't wanna get on a tangent, but I generally think "avant-garde" should never be used unless it's referencing an artist/movement/whatever that actually references itself as such, and then only maybe. "Avant-garde" brings into questions all sorts of notions about "progression" and "revolution" in the arts that the pieces or artist in question may never even raise in their own work! Also, if you can call just about anything "avant-garde" (including stuff that, technically, ain't on the vanguard of jack shit) then you're basically making the term meaningless.

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?

Yeah, see what little I know about Greenberg doesn't lead me to make ANY assumptions about what he thought. I've read a few things here or there, but he's one of those dudes that seem to be referenced more by other people (to justify their points, not his) then actually read (and I'd put myself in that group of people who reference without reading him, too).

I would think that what he was trying to say was just as academic painting of the 19th century could be pretty much churned out according to formula, once you mastered the technique; so it is easy to churn out avant-garde (or at least "avant-garde") art, once you get the concept. I don't know for sure what Greenberg was talking about though and have not read him myself.

I remember taking a poetry writing class in college where with an instructor who talked about "generating language" or something of that sort, and had us just keeping little books and filling them up with language of whatever sort, as potential material for poems. Anyway, it made me think that Language poetry was ideally suited for an academic setting. You could teach someone how to make an approximation of a "language poem" pretty easily. Language poetry as the new academic poetry.