If we are to sidestep such an intrinsic division between conceptual art on the one hand, and other kinds of art on the other, then theories concerned mainly with art that is not conceptual will have to make many significant concessions in order to incorporate the problematic case that conceptual artworks present.
One of the over-riding concerns that beset the philosophy of conceptual art is thus whether and, if so, why one should actively pursue unified accounts in the philosophy of art. Whether one comes out of that investigation embracing a broader — albeit perhaps vaguer — set of concepts and tools than one started off with, or whether one considers oneself forced to abandon any hope of anything but very specific theories of art, artist, and artistic experience, conceptual art obliges us to think about where we stand on these issues.
Philosophizing about conceptual art is, then, not merely philosophizing about one specific artform. It is philosophizing about the most revisionary kind of art, one that sees its own task as being profoundly philosophical in nature.
Let us now turn to five more specific philosophical themes that conceptual art urges us to consider. The problem of defining art is by no means a problem for conceptual art alone. Two principal difficulties immediately arise in the context of any attempt to form a definition. First, the category of art is particularly heterogeneous. Simply put, there seems to be an infinite variety of things, or kinds of thing, that need to fall under its jurisdiction.
Second, there is great variety of opinion on what any putative definition of art should actually consist of. On the standard conception, a definition is something that provides us with necessary and sufficient conditions for some thing x to be F, so that, for example, it is a necessary and sufficient condition for a number to be an even number that it is i an integer and ii divisible by two. Accordingly, a definition of art must be capable of outlining a clear set of conditions that must be satisfied.
There have been no shortages of attempts to define art in this manner. Most prominently perhaps, it has been suggested that art ought to be defined in terms of its aesthetic character, so that, roughly, x is an artwork if and only if x gives rise to an aesthetic experience e. It is no coincidence, then, that a neo-Wittgensteinian approach came to dominate the philosophy of art in the late s and s.
That is to say, some concepts — such as that pertaining to sports, for example— simply do not allow for definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and art is best as understood as one of them. In the words of Morris Weitz, art may be. The act of proposing a definition of art thus becomes a less stringent exercise of conceptual analysis.
If some significant resemblance to such a paradigmatic case is observed, we can rightly call the object of our scrutiny a work of art. The proposal, though interesting, is not without its own difficulties. One problem that immediately arises relates to the idea of resemblance itself, and the way it rapidly expands in such a way as to render it close to useless. This is for the simple reason that we can always find some way in which some given thing may be said to resemble any other given thing.
This kind of openness, it is important to note, is not something that fits in with the programme of conceptual art. Whilst conceptual art does hold that any kind of object could be a work of art, it is not saying that every object is a work of art.
Far from it. In that sense, conceptual art presents a particularly difficult case for the neo-Wittgensteinian method of identification. The notion of resemblance is clearly of little use here. Picking up on this concern, Arthur Danto has famously suggested that it is in fact a non-manifest relation that makes something an artwork rather than an observable property Danto The general idea here is that artworks are generated within a social and artistic context, and so being an artwork is a function of certain social relations.
Setting aside the details of such an account, one of the things conceptual art has helped philosophers to grasp more fully is that any successful general definition, or indeed principled theory of the identification of art, will need to have the non-manifest properties of artworks at its centre.
A more promising line of enquiry has been developed by David Davies. In that sense, the artwork is primiarly identified with the intentional acts through which it comes into being rather than with the end-product of that process Davies Art, on this view, is better understood as a kind of performance than as a manifest object.
By shifting the focus of our attention in this way, we can overcome many of the difficulties associated with defining art, most notably that of its heterogeneity. It may be, then, that the most enduring lesson to be learnt from conceptual art with regards to the definition of art is not so much that a conceptual analysis of art is completely unattainable, as that we simply have been looking in the wrong place.
The claim that conceptual art is to be identified less with a perceivable object than with the meaning or idea it aims to convey, gives rise to a host of complex ontological questions.
The rejection of traditional artistic media, together with the de-materialisation of the art object, forces us to reconsider what seemed to be relatively uncomplicated aspects of artistic experience. In the first instance, conceptual art drives us to review the common assumption that appropriate appreciation and engagement with an artwork must involve a direct first-hand experience of that piece itself.
But — and herein lies the crux of the problem for conceptual art — what if there is nothing for us to get a first-hand perceptual experience of? More pertinently, what does it even mean to have a perceptual engagement with an artwork that claims, basically, to be an idea?
Does the de-materialisation of such art not suggest that there is not only a rejection of traditional artistic media in conceptual art, but an outright refutation of artistic media in general?
One possible way of making sense of this idea is with a distinction outlined by Davies, namely that between physical medium and vehicular medium Davies Crucially, a vehicular medium is said to incorporate not only physical objects such as paintings and sculptures, say but also actions, events, and generally more complex entities.
Adhering to this vehicular medium in art, may then at least equip philosophers with a notion that can deflate the concern of whether conceptual art, by rejecting physical media, denies the need for all artistic media. Clearly, conceptual art is not the first kind of art to raise ontological concerns of this kind. After all, music and literary art, be it traditional or avant - garde , hardly present straightforward cases either.
The question of what exactly constitutes, say, a novel or a musical work have been widely discussed for some time e. According to this theory, the artwork is thus not the material thing itself but, rather, the way in which the artist arrived at the underlying structure shared by all instances or performances of that work. Whilst the general approach fostered by both Currie and Davies is clearly congenial to some aspects of conceptual art, it might nevertheless still be the case that further work needs to be done if the view that artworks are basically event- or action-types is to accommodate all art in the conceptual tradition.
Further questions include what role, if any, is played by the set of material thing s that many conceptual artists undeniably do present us with. What, in other words, are we to make of the object be it a human body or a video-recording that is supposed to transmit the idea which, in turn, is said to be the genuine artwork?
A good philosophical explanation needs to be given as to how the material thing that is regularly presented to the audience is, in fact, relevant to the artwork itself. Is the vehicular medium constitutive of the artwork, and if so, how exactly does that square with the claim of de-materialisation?
Underlying the claim that we need to have a direct experiential encounter with an artwork in order to appreciate it appropriately is the fact that some of the properties that bear on the value of a work can only be grasped in this way.
The properties in question here are generally aesthetic properties, and the assumption motivating the experiential requirement is that the appreciation of artworks necessarily involves an aesthetic element i. However, one of the most distinguishing features of conceptual art, setting out as it does to replace illustrative representation with semantic representation, is that it does not prioritise aesthetic experience in a traditional sense.
If there is to be any kind of first-hand experiential requirement for the appropriate appreciation of conceptual artworks, it will perhaps be of a kind that focuses on an imaginative engagement with the idea central to the artwork rather than a perceptual experience of its aesthetic properties see Schellekens However, not everyone has endorsed such a liberal view about the separation between the aesthetic and the artistic [ 7 ].
If art does not aim at having aesthetic value, what, one might argue, will set it apart from non-art? Fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in thes and still continuing today. Land art or earth art is art that is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks …. Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous ….
Arte povera was a radical Italian art movement from the late s to s whose artists explored a range of …. Social sculpture is a theory developed by the artist Joseph Beuys in the s based on the concept that everything …. John Miller. In response to this …. Jessica Morgan. In this interview, Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan asks conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari, where did your ideas come from?
Enter the fantastical world of the Kabakovs in the first major UK exhibition dedicated to these pioneers of installation art. Main menu additional Become a Member Shop. Art Term Conceptual art Conceptual art is art for which the idea or concept behind the work is more important than the finished art object.
Twitter Facebook Email Pinterest. Related terms and concepts Left Right. John Baldessari, born in , is an American conceptual artist. He often combines image and languages in his art. His early works were canvas paintings that were empty except for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory.
His juxtaposition of image and text is reminiscent of Rene Magritte's surrealist paintings. Sol LeWitt. He rose to prominence in the s with the likes of Rauschenberg, Johns and Stella, and his work was included in the famous exhibit Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum.
LeWitt's art often employed simple geometric forms and archetypal symbols, and he worked in a variety of media but was most interested in the idea behind the artwork. Robert Rauschenberg. Robert Rauschenberg, a key figure in early Pop art, admired the textural quality of Abstract Expressionism but scorned its emotional pathos.
His famous "Combines" are part sculpture, part painting, and part installation. Robert Smithson. Smithson's large-scale projects employed earth and other natural resources to construct works that both manipulated and preserved the natural landscape. His most famous work is Spiral Jetty in Utah, constructed entirely from basalt, earth and salt.
Walter de Maria. Walter de Maria is an American sculptor, composer, and multi-media artist whose best known work is The Lightning Field , consisting of lightning rods situated on a field in New Mexico. Damien Hirst. His best known work is Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living , comprised of a dead tiger shark suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde. Jenny Holzer. Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual and mixed-media artist.
Her work is best known for using a variety of text, propaganda imagery, sound, video and light, all of which she attempts to incorporate into public spaces, thus bringing artistic experience directly into the world.
Joseph Kosuth. Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist, philosopher and essayist. His most celebrated work is One and Three Chairs , which doubles as a piece of commentary on Plato's Theory of Forms. He is likewise well-known for his essay "Art after Philosophy," considered a key text of postmodern art writing. Institutional Critique.
Institutional Critique is the practice of systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions and their connections to the development of art. Institutional Critique focuses on the relationships between the viewer, language, process, the consumption of art.
Identity Politics. Installation Art. Installation art is a genre of contemporary art-making in which two- and three-dimensional materials are used to transform a particular site into an immersive space for the visitor. Installations may include sculptural, found, sound-based, and performance elements, and can be permanent or ephemeral.
Important Art and Artists of Conceptual Art. The absent drawing is a Conceptual work avant la lettre , and a precursor to works like Sol Lewitt's Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value , a gag piece, where LeWitt supposedly interred a simple cube in a collector's yard, and with it he buried Minimalism's object-centered approach.
A physical chair sits between a scale photograph of a chair and a printed definition of the word "chair. Joseph Kosuth once wrote, "The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art.
Thus, it is The idea underlying this piece was the creation of an actual yet invisible work of art. With the help of an industrial drill, de Maria dug a narrow hole in the ground exactly one kilometer deep, inserted a two-inch diameter brass rod of the same length, then concealed it with a sandstone plate.
A small hole was cut in the plate's center to reveal a small portion of the rod, which is perfectly level with the ground. The result is a permanent work of art that people are forced to imagine but may never actually see. As a complementary piece to Vertical Earth Kilometer , de Maria created the far more visible Broken Kilometer , which consisted of five hundred two-meter-long brass rods, neatly arranged on an exhibition floor space in five parallel rows of one hundred rods each.
In keeping with Conceptual artists' dispensation of traditional materials and formal concerns, this work defies the marketplace: it can't be sold or entirely exhibited. Further, its simplicity and largely concealed quality makes it anti-expressive and consistent with the period's many paradoxical negations of the visual in "visual art.
Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf. Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Conceptual Art Started: Mid s. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. If they keep it in their heads, that's fine too. They don't have to buy it to have it - they can just have it by knowing it.
This includes the art of installation, political, feminist, and socially directed art. Summary of Conceptual Art Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works. Three Triangles by Sol LeWitt. Beginnings and Development.
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