Joe Eldrige - ‘Articulating space-time through music’
In My Humble Opinion…

David Bowie once averred that in his Humble Opinion, Brian Eno is to modern populist music what Clement Greenberg was to modern art

“I should make it clear that many of my working forms are taken in whole or in part from my collaborations with Brian Eno, who in my humble opinion occupies the position in late 20th century popular music that Clement Greenberg had to art in the 40's or Richard Hamilton in the 60's.
In general, Brian's perceptions on form or purpose within culture leave most critics tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss spouting virtually nothing but fashionable blathering.
With a little coercion they will happily swan-dive into the vortex of their own making.
However, Brian 'he singe lik a litul gerl ha ha all mixd down and dubul-trak' so I'm one up on him there.
A major chief obstacle to the evolution of music has been the almost redundant narrative form. To rely upon this old war-horse can only continue the spiral into the British constraint of insularity. Maybe we could finally relegate the straightforward narrative to the past.
On the other hand, modern circumstances having had a dysfunctioning capacity upon pure chronological perspective, my writing has often relied too arbitrarily on violence and chaos as a soft option to acknowledging spiritual and emotional starvation. I know I'm not alone with his dilemma.
On yet another hand, chaos itself has been expressed intelligently, contextually, virulently and in vital ways by Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Fall, Glen Branca, Television, Suicide, to name but a few. Now this chaos, chthonic and Apollonian mush, harnessed and ordered, can work for us. It could be reordered within a formal harmony to recreate focus and, to some degree, rebalance the often loutish nadir into which we have blundered.
Our prodigious British talent is more than able to reveal the real gems submerged under this swaggering, violent and ignorant millennium.”
David Bowie quoted from the sleeve notes of ‘Buddha of Suburbia-The Soundtrack’ September 15th '93

Clement Greenberg, the pre-eminent Art Historian and Art Critic who slavered in the latter half of the 20th Century and heralded the Avant-Garde into the canon of Modern Art held an opinion (sic) amongst many others, that music criticism differed from music reviewing. He dispensed with the notion of “Good Taste” in favour the more obvious utilization of the primacy of Sound Judgement in critiquing {music},

“To experience art as art is-again-to evaluate, to make, or rather receive, value judgments, consciously and unconsciously. (A value judgment doesn't mean a formulation or statement, a putting of something into thoughts and words; a value judgment takes place; the thoughts and words come afterwards.” What was involved here is something he would have called “aesthetic incapacity”: the incapacity that lay in letting irrelevant factors like newness and oldness shut off aesthetic experience, inhibit the operations of Taste. This inhibition, he surmised, amounted to, had amounted to, a kind of judgment on aesthetic experience itself. And it was this poor judgment, this disparaging judgment, that seemed to control too much of what was offered as criticism of contemporary fine art {by art here he meant all the disciplines including music}. He suggested that there should be more to criticism than the expressing of value judgements by avowing that “ Description, analysis, and interpretation, even interpretation, have their place. But without value judgment these can become arid, or rather they stop being criticism. (A bad work of art can offer as much for description, analysis, and interpretation-yes, interpretation-as a good work of art. It's possible to go on as long about a failed Goya as about a successful one.) In My humble opinion, Greenberg would have averred that tonality had as much validity as atonality. He would also have, presumably allowed a work to be performed to such rules, endorsing the resulting paradoxical cacophony to be appraised as Discordant Consonance or Harmonious Dissonance within a sensation of aural meta-aesthetics. Greenberg would have dispensed with the extra-aesthetic contexts of art: social, political, economic, philosophical, biographical etc., etc.? And also the historical moment. Having already identified these areas as being as significant as much as factorising and justifying criticism. He had already asked “ Don't they have to be brought in?” He questioned as to “how can aesthetic value be kept enough in sight in such contexts?” He concluded that it doesn't have to be. For; when such contexts are brought to the fore it's no longer criticism that's being practiced. It's something else, something that can be valuable, something that can be necessary. But it's not criticism. And let those who occupy themselves with such contexts not think they're doing criticism; or that they're rendering criticism proper unnecessary.”

Clement Greenberg later proposes that what is new {in music} is something else. He states

“That {just because} the value in itself, the autonomous value, of the aesthetic wasn't asserted so often in the past, at least in the Western past, doesn’t mean that we're permitted to keep on doing the same {and ignore its existence least deny its existence}. We've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. The more ruthless examination and cross-examination of inner experience, the more searching introspection, that have gone with the advance (if it can be called that) of rationality have shown well enough that the aesthetic is an intrinsic, ultimate, and autonomous value. Art for Art's Sake has helped, and so have 200-odd years of aesthetics, both of them giving much and taking away enough. There's no excuse now for not realizing that when the absolute value of the aesthetic is doubted, the reality itself of the aesthetic is doubted, the absoluteness being inseparable from the reality. Just as this reality is there and can't be thought away, so the status of that value is there and can't be thought away.”

Greenberg gilds his astonishingly contradictory perspective on aesthetic reality by broaching and extending his meta-aesthetic contrary “Extraaesthetic Values Invoked” paradox,
“Bearing this in mind can make the doing of art criticism-of any kind of aesthetic criticism-difficult. It means writing about art as art before anything else. And it does seem easier to write and talk about art as something else. I know it's easier for me. But it doesn't catch my interest much when I read or hear that kind of writing or talk. Almost, if not quite, I can do without it.”
Abstract RocknRollism, Abstract DrumnBassism, Abstract Reggaeism, Abstract Classicalism, Anyone?
{Remember he elevated that particular argument by proclaiming that we have to take into account the historical, political, social, ideological, moral and what nots in order to justify “Extraaesthetic Values Invoked”}
So was David Bowie right? Was Clement Greenberg? Was Brian Eno himself?

This article has answered the Title Object by utilising the following words that convey space {X} time

Are: x3 = present
Is: x4 = present
Late 20th Century: x1= past
40s: x1=past
60s:x1=past
Be: x
Were: x0=non-existential

Vortex of their own making x, 1,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 =NOW
Quotes from: Clement Greenberg, ART CRITICISM
From Partisan Review, Vol. XLVII No. 1, 1981

Writings