Reynolds has a fast-paced, frothy prose style, which makes for entertaining reading, especially in his extensive trawling of different tracts of pop history. But his account of the formal development of popular music is predicated on a notion of progress which I found problematic, even when it isn’t (as it is often is) put in technological terms.

Reynolds treats the march of samplers and synthesizers in the nineties as an identifying mark of the ferociously creative (according to Reynolds) acid-house movement, which shed outdated technology—and its attendant songcraft—over mere years or even months.¹ Put that way—I mean, months, really?—you would think that acid-house would be the perfect reductio ad absurdum for this obsession with progress: why the reflexive need for apparent newness? But that doesn’t stop him from coming to expect this particular form of change in his evaluations of other pop idioms elsewhere in the book. And any artist operating in a traditional rock arrangement is always already “retro” (an essentially derogatory term here, bordering on “derivative”) regardless of how each particular contextualization may be radically contingent on its contemporary idiom.²

I found that, almost always, he passes over the development of new constructions for meaning in music—the basic combination of lyric and music (this is not true in other work by Reynolds). For example, in one passage about Patti Smith:

The Patti Smith Group’s orientation towards the sixties was obvious from the git-go. The group’s 1974 debut single, ‘Hey Joe,’ was a garage-band standard, but the cover mainly signified as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix; the track was even recorded at Electric Lady, the New York studio Hendrix built, although he died before he could use it… The glorious swagger of white R&B that was ‘Gloria’ distilled the entire ‘argument’ of [Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye’s] Nuggets into a rough few minutes of rough-hewn excitement… Strangely, virtually no one at the time noticed that Horses was in large part all about Smith’s Freudian ‘family romance’; with her sixties fathers. Horses made her an icon, but she started out as an iconographer, patterning her persona and practicising the art of ‘presence’ through close study of her heroes.

But what if we replace Patti Smith with the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix with the blues guys at Chess Records? I mean, really, for whom is this not the case? And what of fact that the Patti Smith Group actually sounds nothing like Hendrix? It beggars the very idea of originality. What sort of influence or cues constitute “iconography,” rather than mere influence? No one writes music in a vacuum.

As I complained about earlier, this lack of clear distinction between influence and imitation lands him with prejudices I found irritating: where Reynolds seems to be ambivalent about U2 and The Police musically, they are still representatives of progress, offering certain contemporary novelties in their atmospherics, posturing, rhythmic tics. By contrast, The Jesus and Mary Chain he considers quintessentially retro—their structural references to girl-group era 60s pop are pretty plain once you get past the modern noise. But what is the difference between the maudlin, if state-of-the-art rock-and-roll playing of U2—and the rock-and-roll playing of Mary Chain, except that the case made by the latter about tradition is clearer? I mean “tradition” in the T.S. Eliot sense, in the sense of understanding the history of the form, which Louis Menand summarized recently in the New Yorker:

The point is philosophical. I know what I’m looking at is a house because I am already familiar with things that look more or less like it and are houses. This is what enables me to say that the particular house I am looking at is a big house, an ugly house, a modern house, and so on. The same thing happens when I read a poem: I relate it to all the other poems I have read—in the head of the ideal reader, to all the poems ever written. Past poems condition my response to any new poem. And the really new poem conditions my response to all poems that preceded it… Eliot argued that, since this is case whether a poet is conscious of the tradition or not, he or she might as well be conscious of it.

I guess I just don’t see how the formulae of The Police or U2 are any less referential to their precursors. But that The Jesus and Mary Chain seems to be more aware and precise about their lineage cues the critic up to perceive irony, which once again brings on the “retro” label.³ This ignores that their music (it seems to me) is considerably more persuasive and disruptive in its contemporary moment than either of the other examples—and it’s that way not because its allusions and references are so knowing, but due to the combined effect of its lyrics, sound, playing and production—that is, its overall wry ambivalence: a feedback-defaced echo of the pop sublime. Stale classic-rock sentiments dressed in modern production techniques, or uncomfortably pinned to reggae rhythms, do not make them any less stale. I would also argue that acid-house’s newness as a representative of what Reynolds sees as the modernist imperative is an illusion: as Menand observes, “to modernize is not to make a brand new thing, it’s to bring an old thing up to date.”

Throughout Retromania, there’s little attention to music as a matter of meaning-making. Meaning made through pure formal relation, like chord progression, tone, etc.; or conveyed through lyrics, and the interaction of the two. Meaning is also created by presentation or pose—which, in popular music, has always been an important part of the artist’s voice—knowing that Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan or Madonna is Madonna is essential to understanding the work. Reynolds argues that, in recent years, pop music is becoming more and more like fashion—i.e. more empty and referential—but as his viewpoint approaches the present what really seems to happen is his perspective narrows to include only those things he calls fashion. The rest of that complex machinery of meaning-making, which is taken for granted in earlier epochs, goes simply unmentioned. If he really doesn’t find anything meaningful in music he defines as retro—beyond its stylistic references—he might say so outright, but for the most part he doesn’t.

I have trouble seeing this attitude as anything other than a capitulation to the Boomers’ self-conception. Rock music only begins “repeating” itself as soon as its audience, producers, and musicians become comfortable enough with what they know of its near-history to start making promiscuous, overly determinate comparisons. If the blues-era Stones or R&B-era Beatles weren’t “retro” it’s only because the black recording artists they were based on weren’t an established touchstone for their own cultural sphere. (The sixties generation generally seems eager to defend their ultimate originality from all successors.)

The tendency to avoid the broader, more complex value-laden associations bound up in pop music strikes me as symptomatic of the current critical landscape. After the Culture Wars (multiculturalism versus canon, theory versus criticism, relativism versus moral absolutes), academics of the Anglophone world seemed filled with anxiety and distrust about critical authority, favoring historical fact or social relevance—individual interpretation discarded in favor of programmatic schema. Though Reynolds is not an academic and certainly isn’t squeamish to pass judgment, the values underlying his interpretations are too often underexamined. I find when pressure is applied to these theoretical schemas in general, they usually reveal how incomprehensible their central assumptions (e.g., “innovation,” “retro”) are in the absence of value-based interpretation. Without critical authority—resorting to one’s own judgment based on the whole crazy spectrum of the historical moment—claims that some things are derivative and others aren’t become hopelessly slippery. By the end, reading each new specimen of retro mania made me think of a fish unhooked on a pier. So tortured into compliance with the concept of the encroaching retro, each is robbed of its own fluidity, robbed of the vital flexibility only by which you can appreciate its flickering nuance.

1. Perhaps this technological obsession is ultimately a holdover from the Sgt. Pepper’s and Pet Sounds era, when novel instrumentation, song structures and advances in technology moved in perfect step with developments in lyrics, playing and social scope. I’m also reminded of the emergence of the piano in Bach’s time—a major development, and a technological one—but these coincidences I think are fairly exceptional.

2. Arguments for the paramount importance of context appear from various modern thinkers: Borges’ Pierre Menard story, appropriation art, and the language philosophy of J.L. Austin, among others.

3. Reynolds makes a distinction between the retro tendency and antiquarianism on the basis that retro “fetishizes” the immediate past, but I had difficulty making out what gives this distinction enough significance to justify the values Reynolds ascribes to it.

The three convergences that strike me as being relevant are: the collapse of well-structured R&B music that occurred in the nineties (epitomized, or transcended, by R. Kelly), the cross-breeding of Top-40 pop with rap (that Biggie, as central as he was to rap, predestined), and the ascendency of European dance music (through, for one, Madonna’s stewardship—and bleeding through the spectrum for example in the production collaborations of Bjork—and the crash of Daft Punk upon America). It is true that hip-hop has been, since the mid-1990s, weaning itself off songs that speak primarily to individuals—rather, it seems to have approximated focus group response, it’s successfully conformed to the marketplace. But even in late-era Lil Jon club-bangers and the DayQuil sunset of Screwed Up Click in 2006–2007, underneath the strings and echo, I feel like I could make out the outline of Atlanta or Houston; the local traditions in the form still, on some level, seemed to dictate the tonality of the approach.

Meanwhile, underground hip-hop has returned from its retreat in social-consciousness and artificial, overwritten “alternative” but found itself as a denatured, Internet-era artform, where Diplo and mixtapes dictate history. And at the other end, Rihanna and Drake have found that origins are something to be invented, not built upon. Today no ramshackle Southern studio (or Williams/Hugo) personality stands a chance of coloring the American landscape. Sometimes it seems like there is no specifically American landscape left.

Tom Ewing hedges it slightly in Poptimist 32:

Part of the problem is a general acceptance that music is fragmented, and that “monoculture” is a thing of the past. It’s worth pointing out though that the examples people give for monoculture—Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson—aren’t really representative of anything. People’s window on the “wider culture” has always been limited, and very dependent on social circumstance. If 30 million people have watched a Lady Gaga video, then what “monoculture” meant was control over scheduling, not content: The zeitgeist is as real or unreal as it ever was, what’s changed is that we don’t all notice it at once.

But I don’t think this goes far enough. In fact, I see this process as taking place in almost completely the opposite direction: if there has ever been a “monoculture” (and there almost certainly has not been, in the sense it is meant here, in the twentieth century) I would argue that it is in the process of forming precisely because of this fragmentation. Instead of the old two-party system—the establishment and the counterculture—we now have an integrated culture, Gaga and Arcade Fire on the same Billboard. “Rockism” is out, but with it we lose the old codes of listening.¹ It may not be quite a cats-and-dogs-living-together, jocks-and-the-nerds-sitting-at-the-same-table apocalypse; but there does seem to be a new hegemony over the reception of pop music. A kind of mass-Pitchforkization of pop listeners, which through the very machinery listed above—old/new media changeover, increasingly heterogeneous lifestyles—becomes all the more irrepressible, as, in place of one American Bandstand (and a rainbow of backwater DJs) we now have a vast and expertly positioned array of Urban Outfitters and NPR affiliates through which a common sort of received wisdom trickles. And there’s practically no serious criticism widely read except Pitchfork, and therefore no other venues can make a serious impact in alternate contextualizations or canons or orders. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone has achieved the enviable condition of Entertainment Weekly, Christgau’s Consumer Guide is dead at age forty-one,² and everyone else (e.g., Frere-Jones of the New Yorker) comes out from Pitchfork’s overcoat.

I don’t mean to say that Pitchfork is the reason for this process, though I am saddened that the vast resources of the Internet and its infinite supply of record-store geeks and message boards has failed to produce legitimate competition (maybe the mp3 blogs will eventually perform this function but I find it doubtful). In any case, it seems the world has flattened, and to pick a specific side today—yesterday’s beats or hippies or punks—makes you weirdly backwards, as if intentionally marginalizing yourself (and dangerously in proximity to a Hot Topic genre-study). But you needn’t pick a side, that’s the point. Not any more.

1. For “rockism,” see 1 and, somewhat more opaquely, 2. “Old codes of listening” sounds reactionary, and probably is. But I find that the attitude in which someone is capable of only truly being interested in punk or hip-hop is more amenable to having a strong identification and therefore rich emotional rapport with the music, whereas the consumers devouring everything (myself included) and the musicians in turn attempting to layer it all together into one casserole—seems, for all that accumulation, less.
2. Robert Christgau talks about it with the LA Times.

Mariah’s reign as princess/vocalist ended interestingly coterminously with the Disney noblewomen’s run in theaters. “Fantasy” represented her first hybrid attempt. It was a good one, but it subterfuged the voice as the center of the experience, replacing it with the signage of pop. The transition made there proved to be an irreversible one, probably, in fact, by choice, but also, in effect, by chance. Though Celine Dion kept on as a broad belter for another few years, the blockbuster vocalist model was damaged. Singing, even very athletic singing, wouldn’t suffice without branding or directionality. Obliged after this moment in any full-scale industry effort was a piano (singer songwriter), a dance routine, an off-the-rack R&B/country/dance insinuation, or a rapper to croon alongside of.

All of this makes the moment of “Hero,” “I’ll Be There,” “Without You” and the like sort of singular. The Carey-Mottola marriage, with all its royal (cartoon) wedding trappings stamped a version of mastery on the music industry at its financial peak: the Cinderella story of the session vocalist and producer prince surpassing Elvis in number ones. You could embed plenty of cynical connotations there, but then who can resist the lure of a heyday, especially one that encompasses such a pure (somehow naive, somehow Clintonian?) aggregated form of American style-power.

The “Fantasy” shift for Mariah also brought with it the assertion of a personality, which was awkward for everyone for many years and something only the drag queen fan in me can really get behind. Though the pleasures of “Honey,” “Always Be My Baby” and “We Belong Together” are many, the experience is fractured and dependent on neutralizing the source; accepting it as a cultural document instead of the heart-infused output of a set of lungs. Gone is the young, black bodysuited Mariah of B-cup, bland video, and “Emotions” high note; the coherent source of prosaic joy emblematic a pop period that she made and was.

Many scholars have made the distinction between two meanings of popular music. On the one hand, popular music can be defined as that which sells the best. Consumers vote with their dollars. Generations of scholars have attempted to move beyond this simple formula, because it equates people’s culture too closely to the products that are available in the marketplace. A second meaning of popular music is that is the music coming from the people, the populace. You have to look beyond the record racks to see what music people are making themselves. Folk music, indie music, early hip-hop: These, and many other styles, have accrued a measure of cachet because of the supposed distance from the pop charts. They have been celebrated as somehow more representative of people’s cultures than are the corporate widgets pushed by the majors.

It’s a problem that moves in two directions: there’s Miller’s “popular” which attempts to confront the matter of social impact, but, what I think he deliberately sidesteps here (in never shortening his phrase) is the confusion also with the idea of “pop” as a musical quality. But the difference between market popularity and lasting social significance has been well-documented in scholarship, whereas the quality of “poppiness” in music has, to this ear, no satisfactory equivalents elsewhere.¹ Though its dictionary boundries still confine it to the specific product of commercialism, its use by musicians and critics is not purely economical in scope, but tends to mean something like the tune itself is “catchy,” or has an effective hook.

“Pop” in this sense wouldn’t seem to have “necessary and sufficient” conditions, but rather is, to lean on Wittgenstein, a concept identifiable by “family resemblances”: which I would hazard line up with simplicity, directness, an attempt to maximize simultaneously melody and concision. A band like Led Zeppelin, for example, with their ponderous and amorphous FM radio epics, is qualitatively less “pop” than one-man studio wiz Todd Rundgren (whose Something/Anything Robert Christgau said had “the feel of a pop masterpiece”), even though Zepp has zombie-like endurance in the marketplace, while only one of Rundgren’s records ever clawed its way to Gold certification.

Actually, Something/Anything was one of the numerous records in the seventies that seemed principally interested in subjecting the quality of “pop” to a kind of hermeneutic interrogation, approaching it with a kaleidoscopic arc of stylistic angles — R&B on one song, doo-wop on another, rockabilly on the next — that reached a point of saturation in Nick Lowe’s 1978 LP Jesus of Cool (which was released as Pure Pop For Now People in the US). And, despite that fascination with “pop,” Lowe never had the popularity of, say, Styx.

But the qualities I outlined above — catchiness and shortness, say — do seem to be informed by the needs of the market: so, a song getting “stuck in your head” tends to make it memorable, which helps sell records; and it being short makes it both more digestible as a whole while also fitting it into a tighter radio format. But as qualities specific to the music they’re not actually the commercial forces in themselves, but only its effects rendered into criteria; and I’m not sure that’s automatically damnable in itself.²

I think that more or less cleaves open this question to the degree I’d intended to. But it might be useful to document what ways its usage in each instance it seems to point, since “catchiness” and “hookiness” are already altogether abstract and threaten, if spoken of in general, to become completely circular. And its specific manifestations likely take different forms in different genres, as identical repetition for example is more amenable to dance music than psychedelic rock, and in one speaks to accessibility and the other to aridity. But such contradictory oppositions may help unearth some otherwise unknowable contour of the idea.

1. “Pulp fiction” is too closely tied to kitsch; “pop art” was always too conceptual and comprehensive an aesthetic to be really divisible in the same way.

2. I have mixed feelings about the way Adorno treats this relationship. In his 1941 essay, he exhibits a fine sensitivity to the particularity of the “pop” of the time, but seems in every instance to have made up his mind beforehand. And the “detail as an indivisible part of a whole” is a particularly vague, not to mention antique, argument to rely upon.

Several years ago, Daniel Green wrote on his blog The Reading Experience about a similar relationship that he saw developing between novels and screenplays:

If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it’s because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it’s not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it’s because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire.

But I suspect that for many this is not an aspiration — conscious or otherwise — so much as it is their most familiar standard. It isn’t unlikely that, for many of these novelists, the structural traditions of film and television are more familiar and immediate than those of literature (especially modernist literature). It’s possible that they are not corrupted by a commercial motive, or driven by a desire for a wider audience, but merely limited by a narrative sensibility influenced most deeply by those arts to which they’ve had the most exposure.

This comes at the point from a different direction than that of the combination of pop song and movie. Novels written for the screen are affected in their actual substance, rather than merely their context. But it’s more a range of intensity than a difference in kind. The cover of a book might tint its reception almost undetectably, whereas the genre a given movie is understood to follow might radically alter its understanding.¹ But the ultimate effect: the intrusion and coloring of perspective in the reader or viewer, is the same phenomenon.

I have found that the effect of seeing a music video before hearing a song alone can be distracting. It can be difficult to “un-see” its style of presentation; to unlearn whatever you then think you know about the speaker’s voice. In cinema, it seems to me that things get even more intensely interwoven: the usage of The Doors’ “The End” provides a lot to Apocalypse Now, and Apocalypse Now provides a lot to “The End.” The confused, overlapping guitar and keyboard lines generate a tension with the relatively slow, dark exposition. And the song, which has pretty ineffective lyrics, benefits from the film’s dim depiction of tribal rituals, the flickering torch-light melding in with the undulating guitars—it’s a correlative effect.² If I had never heard “The End” before I saw the movie, my experience of the song might be inextricable from the emotional moment as it is in the film. As it is, after seeing the film I found things to like about the song that I wouldn’t have otherwise — but things that, strictly speaking, aren’t part of the song except through, or as the product of, an association. Where are such things rightly filed? Is it possible (or desirable) to try to ignore them for the purpose of looking at the song itself?

But I expect in many serious cinema-goers and people whose whole experience of popular music is mediated by music videos, the understanding and ultimate judgment of songs has, by now, a highly parasitic relationship dependent on the quality of the corresponding visual component. Sometimes this can be pretty surprising in its range. ELO, once considered obsolete in many quarters—a dinosaur of seventies radio pop—became suddenly respectable in the world of Starbucks and NPR when “Mr. Blue Sky” was used in a Volkswagen spot. Music that was previously only represented visually by the spaceships on its album sleeves and Jeff Lynne’s hair was made digestible by a sharply photographed short of a whimsical type fashionably groomed and attired.

But probably the matter of its social acceptability isn’t quite as simple as such a description makes it sound — it isn’t merely a reawakening of interest or a contemporary contexualization that makes the song available for this new audience (if that were true, samples in hip-hop would widely rehabilitate interest in their sources — but they only do within small and highly musically developed enclaves). Rather, for those who came to understand a sense of the song through its usage in the commercial, there was the necessity of a visual-narrative cue. With an incomplete visual context, the song could not be fully understood — an intermediary operation was necessary, a sort of translation from the original language of pop music. This would point to an aesthetic literacy that ends with film and television — where even arts as apparently easy and accessible as pop music are difficult to comprehend on their own terms, and can only be understood through the idiom of the screen.

1. Denis Dutton argues persuasively for an intentionalist attitude about genre his essay on Wimsatt/Beardsley.

2. The use of Wagner, by contrast, is exploitative, or at least one-directional. The irony is too impermeable; the piece serves only as a prop for a scene that is flashily critical without much ambiguity.

Kreitler is critical of low-fidelity recording as employed by a small coterie of recent indie rock bands, taking as examples the Vivian Girls, Wavves, and Times New Viking.¹ A little indiscriminately, he impugns their ability to play live:

Vivian Girls are about as amateur as a band could be without being children… Wavves’ Nathan Williams self-destructed during his second-ever European show… the Crystal Stilts’ live performances are more accurately described as “without qualities” than as “low-quality.”

It’s probably true that the Vivian Girls, like countless bands before them, only really got comfortable with their instruments after they had been on the road for a while. I’m not sure what the reference to the Crystal Stilts means—in any case, they’re seasoned musicians, one of whom has been recording since the 90s. But the assumption that he is working against—that some artistic legitimacy is conferred by the demonstration of technical skill—seems pretty quaint (like defending Picasso on the basis of his draftsmanship).

The next sticking point involves the question of what it means to be a “song.” Kreitler acknowledges that the debate about whether “the songs are in fact good or bad under the production” is problematic by its very terms—where does the song end and the production begin?—but then seems to accept those terms.

If what is being discussed is a particular recording—if that is what we mean by “song”—then there isn’t anything that can exist separate from its production, that can somehow be not-produced. If, on the other hand, we are supposed to be evaluating a song based on what can be notated on a piece of paper, that would render the differences in versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or, say, “My Funny Valentine” incomprehensible or irrelevant. A rather difficult position to entertain.

Kreitler doesn’t go that far, but he takes it that there is something being done here that has a non-musical end, and that something serves to obfuscate some other thing (“the song”):

So is the fuzz part of the song or something done to the song? My contention is that it’s a supplement in the Derridean sense. Derrida reminds us that supplement (at least in French) properly has two meanings: a supplement both supplements and supplants. That is, it not only adds to its object but also replaces it. It’s what Derrida called an “undecidable,” neither wholly one or the other.

He’s referring to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau, which appeared in Of Grammatology. This little interlude is probably unnecessary by the standards of his argument, but if taken to its logical conclusion, the same concept sort of uproots much else of what he says. Derrida argued that there always lingered in Rosseau’s usage of this word the supposition that the secondary matter, the supplement, was inessential, and that the first was self-sufficient and therefore superior, or privileged. So, for example, speech, to which writing was a supplement, occupied a privileged position. (In this construction: the “song,” to which “fuzz” is a supplement, is privileged.) But Derrida argued that, in parallel to its second meaning, supplement always also provides the missing qualities that the first was incapable of supplying on its own.

The listening experience is not just one of listening to a song, but discerning a song that is slightly buried, slightly elsewhere… We don’t just hear the song but in part imagine the song in the context its production suggests, that is, as something older than the contemporary, something mediated by time… In the instance of Wavves we are meant to imagine his garage and to believe that he could not possibly afford to record at a higher fidelity.

To deconstruct Kreitler’s deconstruction, one might say that here, “recording at a higher fidelity” is the privileged position—and he seems to think that doing otherwise is a kind of subterfuge. You could say this is embedded in the word itself, since “production values” is a term used to mean expensive, or high-tech. Lo-fi is, by most definitions, “low quality.” The “accuracy” of a recording is its default desideratum. In interrogating the motive for lo-fi recording, he reflexively turns to terminology of the wanting—“innocent,” “naive”—and asserts that through it, their “records do something to the music that is other than the music.” Building on an interview in which Cassie Ramone of the Vivian Girls jokes about shredding, he extrapolates an opposition between garage and “math” rock and assigns each a modus operandi: math rock is dedicated to formal innovation, whereas the Vivian Girls seek—no doubt to their surprise—“to retrace the very normalcy of [their] gestures.”

Development of “form,” then, is taken exclusively as conspicuous variation in time signature, density of playing, harmonic complexity, technical proficiency, etc., and not lyric mood, instrument tone, indeterminacy, etc.² In an aside, Kreitler adds that electronic music is “a musical lineage that was inscribed with a quest for the new from its beginnings.” I’m having trouble coming up with some modern “lineage” for which that statement would not be true. Anyway, electronic music is also a field in which the value of production is paramount, and the distinction between the production and the “song” is ever harder to determine—a genre in which the exact sound of the percussion can make or break a beat and the combined quality of overlapping sonics is tweaked to the last measure. And yet production, in the case of bands that play guitars, represents “retreat from the historical anxiety of the contemporary moment and the concealment of that retreat in noise.” I suppose if you’re already certain of what the “contemporary moment” is, you are liable to find ways to justify your judgment.

1. I find it a little odd—dubious, even—that he chose to ignore the history of this style, which follows pretty plainly from Guided By Voices, Black Tambourine, K Records, the Jesus & Mary Chain, and goes all the way back to White Light/White Heat.

2. One could argue that the quality of the “overall,” held as a principal virtue in painting by arch-formalist Clement Greenberg, is more akin to these latter qualities.