In "Avant-garde and Kitsch", Greenberg made a distinction between high art and low art, designating the former an anti-commercial form of art, and the latter as linked to business. In his eyes, autonomy from business was inherent to the work of art if art was not easily accessible, readable, and translatable, mainly by refusing visual representation and any other reference to recognisable objects or situations and moving towards an abstraction that went beyond the familiarities of the lives of ordinary people. The quality of an artwork was measured against the ease with which it could be understood, and if too accessible to the average viewer it would lose its aesthetic power and run the risk of being commodified. "What is 'graspable' by the viewer is also 'saleable' —was the modernist attitude. Hence, through a deliberate distance from the "lives of men" art was considered to escape its commodity status. This distance to life resulted in an elitism of (high) art that could only be properly perceived by "a handful of viewers, blessed with the 'faculty of aesthetic perception".