Object, Image or Idea

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Not to dampen this freewheeling discussion, but in common art parlance,
an object is technically a work which exists in the round, i.e. free of
the wall, therefore not a painting.However, starting with Picasso and
Braque who in l912 began adding real-life objects to a series of
paintings, the distinction between certain types of modern painting and
objects began to blur. The use of the word "object" to describe a work
of art was coined by Marcel Duchamp in l917 when he transformed a urinal
into a work of art and titled it "R.Mutt."
Following his lead, the Surrealists went on to use the work "object"to
describe the three-dimensional works which we now call assemblage art.In
order to accommodate the contemporary painters who incomporate objects
into painting,i.e. Rauschenberg, Johns, Nauman, Salle, Schnabel, Mike
Kelly and so on, the term "mixed media" is now used to describe certain
types of hybrid works which are not purely painting and not purely
sculpture.
The term image is associated with representational art, i.e. an
artist's recreation of persons, things and places.
Idea is whatever underlies the making of art.Again, we have Duchamp to
thank for clarifying the fact that it is the originality of the idea
underlying a work of art rather than its mere physical existence which
makes it a work of art, or as rephrased by the conceptual artist Joseph
Kosuth in the late l960s: "Art as Idea as Idea." Of course, some ideas
are better than others.