It's official, conceptual art is crap
Colin Barnard
Following hot on the heels of the Turner Prize being awarded to an empty
gallery with a lighting problem, Ivan Massow the chairman of the
Institute of Contemporary Art, London, claims that most conceptual art
is "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat".
For too many years modern art has been the province of those that have
the ability to see the 'kings new clothes'. But now, just like the boy
in the fable, Massow has had the courage to point out that the king is
naked. Hopefully this will now herald the return of some commonsense to
the British art scene and Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate will not
need to refuse to "explain art to ordinary people".
More in last Thursday's Guardian, 17 January 2002, and last Friday's New
Statesman, 18 January 2002 where Mr Massow he takes a pop at Tracey Emin
of fouled bed fame.
Colin
--
Colin Barnard c...@dcs.qmul.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary,
University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 5234 Fax: +44 (0)20 8980 6533
And now for something completely off the wall ...
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(Its a hook for hanging a picture on)
Edward
Almost every/any art has (or supposed to have) own concept.
And CONCEPTUAL ART can be implemented in any style/technique.
So, what these people actuall mean?
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
keith
Edward <dx2u....@yahoo.com.noSpam> wrote in message
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Peter H.M. Brooks
Edward <dx2u....@yahoo.com.noSpam> wrote in message ...
few years ago because the not very bright thought it sounded
intelligent.
Thus the implication would be that all other art didn't have ideas -
however, if anything is meant by it, it means that it is simply the
idea (that is the easy bit) without going any further.
--
'Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?"
The Latest Decalogue - Arthur Hugh Clough
Wynnk
microcosm
Ricardo Pontes
I figured it was about time I write an article explaining why
conceptual art sucks, since every time I encounter conceptual art, I
start to twitch. Just to define what I'm talking about when I say
"conceptual art," here's an example: In 1936, this guy named Walker
Evans took some really nice black and white pictures of depression-era
sharecroppers in rural Alabama. So far that's not conceptual art, it's
just good photography. Then in 1979, a conceptual artist named Sherrie
Levine decided she would take photographs of Evans' original 1936
photographs and display her photographs in a gallery. The gallery was
more than happy to oblige, since modern curators dig this kind of
crap, for reasons I'll explain later.
Pretty dumb, eh? But the fun is just starting. In 2001, another
conceptual artist named Michael Mandiberg scanned Evans' original 1936
images. Then he scanned Levine's 1979 photographs of Evans' 1936
photographs. He then set up two different Web sites, each featuring a
different set of scans, with downloadable certificates of
authenticity, evidently to add further conceptual "weight" to his
"piece." The two Web sites look identical. There is no recognizable
difference between any of the photographs. Even the site design is
identical. And of course that's all part of the concept.
Now how much would you pay? But wait, there's more! In 2001, another
conceptual artist named Kendall Bruns downloaded all the images from
the Michael Mandiberg site and set up his own mirror site featuring
his own copies of Mandiberg's scanned images of Levine's photographs
of Evans' photographs of Alabama sharecroppers. Or was it merely
Bruns' copies of Mandiberg's scanned images of Evans' photographs of
Alabama sharecroppers, thus leaving Levine's iteration out of the
remix altogether? Things get a little sketchy at this point. But one
thing is certain. There are now three Web sites at three different
URLs that look identical. There are three conceptual artists (one in
1979 and two in 2001) feeling very clever and smug. There are several
museums, graduate arts programs, and online galleries buying into this
crap. And there's only one actual "artist" anywhere to be found, way
back in 1936
First, I'll explain why this type of conceptual art is poor (if I may
be allowed a value judgment). Then, I'll hazard a guess as to why this
kind of conceptual art is as widely accepted as it is.
1. WHY CONCEPTUAL ART SUCKS
Without the artist statements that accompany and explain the point of
these three Web sites, the sites themselves would seem like three
identical online versions of a 1936 photo documentary by Walker Evans.
So the "art" of this art lies primarily—dare I say,
solely—in the idea that the artist statements convey. This is
why the stuff is called conceptual art. Conceptual artists believe
that by making the idea the art, they have escaped the bonds of the
art object, they have bypassed the skill necessary to make the art
object, and they have superseded all the other "base machinations"
that have historically been associated with art.
"Conceptual art is 'pure' art!" the conceptual artist blithely boasts.
"We have escaped the confines of media-assisted communication. We are
now trafficking in the realm of pure thought, mind to mind." Digital
conceptual artists are the worst, because they further muck up their
theory with pedantic odes to the binary muse, the ethereal cloud of
information, the uber-cyber-mind, and all that other extropian
garbledy-goop.
The sad and very pertinent fact is this: Conceptual artists haven't
escaped the confines of media. They've simply chosen a very crude and
rudimentary form of media—the artist statement—and they've
chosen to channel all of their "pure" ideas through that thin and puny
medium. Without the artist statement, the concept simply ain't shared.
The conceptual artist would resent this observation, countering that
the artist statement is merely incidental, and not part of the art
itself. The conceptual artist would have us believe that any resident
physical objects are merely incidental (in this example, Evans'
original 1936 photographs); that the artist statement is incidental;
and all that's left is the pure concept itself. Very convenient, but a
simple removal of the artist statement proves that it is the very
vehicle through which the "pure" concept is transferred. Conceptual
artists may say their artist statements are incidental, but conceptual
artists are wrong.
This is why conceptual art is poor art. With abstract oil painting,
the artist is communicating in the media of color, shape, texture,
canvas and paints. With abstract multimedia art, the artist is
communicating in the media of sound, light, spoken words, patters,
rhythms, series, written words, etc. Note that with these forms of
historically defined "real" art, the artist is still conceptual. He is
still sharing a concept. The "real" artist owns the fact that we can't
read his mind. He further recognizes the fact that written words alone
can't "say" enough. So he learns and masters speaking to us via other
more visceral, emotional channels besides mere prose. The real artist
embraces the fact that a pure idea cannot be transferred from one
person to another without first being encoded into some form of media.
Accepting that fact, he masters the medium of his choice, and he send
his "concept" to us on waves that connect with our whole being, not
just our analytical minds. Bravo.
Whereas the conceptual artist can only strike our minds. His chosen
medium (although he won't admit it) is prose, and a very pedantic,
mechanical, and unpoetic form of prose at that. (Just re-read the
first three paragraphs of this essay and you'll experience my point.)
Wanting to escape the confines of media and traffic in the realm of
pure idea, the conceptual artist inadvertently winds up trafficking in
one of the thinnest, non-resonant, distracting forms of media yet
contrived—the artist statement.
To make an analogy, the "real" artist is a 7-foot tall, dreadlocked
drum and bass DJ broadcasting via radio, satellite, broadband and
cable. The "conceptual" artist is a little 12-year-old kid mumbling
into a paper cup, all the while imagining that he is practicing some
sort of radical new form of telepathic communication. That's why I say
that conceptual art, in its "pure" unadulterated form, is poor art.
2. WHY CONCEPTUAL ART IS SO POPULAR
Here I must digress into a bit of psychological guesswork, but I think
I'm right.
Conceptual art is popular for three main reasons:
a) Conceptual art increases the role of curators and art critics, so
they choose to promote it and write about it because everybody wants
to be more important than they really are.
b) Post-modern relativism is afraid to call anything bad, so
conceptual art sneaks in the back door and the relativist art critics
are bootless to kick it out.
c) Conceptual artists are lazy, untalented, or both. They don't want
to invest the time to learn the skills to make good art. Or maybe they
tried and they just couldn't do it. So they turned to thinking of
ideas and writing artist statements.
a) Before, with real art, curators and art critics were mere servants
of the art. The art object was center stage, the artist was only
slightly left of center (more or less, depending on your particular
critical emphasis), and the curators and critics were somewhere in the
wings. Now, with conceptual art, it's all about the event and the
context. The art object (with all of its multi-sensory ability to
convey emotions/ideas/concepts/truths) is now banished to the wings,
and the artist is either left of center, or more often, he has assumed
the treble role of artist/curator/critic, and is sharing center stage
with a sycophantic entourage of curators, contextualizers, event
hosts, essayists and critical pundits.
What heady stuff this conceptual art is to a curator! "Art" becomes a
sort of staged political event to prove some sort of conceptual point,
usually in dialogue with the modern art community itself. And since
the curator is the figurehead of the modern art community, he has a
very central role to play in "the concept." Even if the conceptual art
seems to ridicule and shun the curator, in fact it always embraces him
by the very fact that it is conceptual. If this were not the case,
conceptual artists would just go don some scuba gear, swim about in a
public fountain noticed only by a few disinterested passers-by, and
return home with the satisfaction of a conceptual job well done. No,
the difference between a conceptual artist and a lunatic is that the
former is in dialogue with a curator, and the latter is in dialogue
with the voices that won't leave him alone. Ironically, if any art
ever needed a gallery, conceptual art does. And the fame-hungry
curator is more than happy to oblige.
What heady stuff this conceptual art is to an art critic! After all,
the artist statement is now the central and sole medium. And aren't
the critical essay and the artist statement kissing cousins? Hot dog!
No more trying to figure out what the art means! Now the art critic
can play a part in defining what the art means. And who better to join
in all this conceptual, linguistic fun than the
champing-at-the-bit-to-be-witty-and-insightful post-modern art critic?
In the '50s, post-structuralist literary criticism freed the then
subservient literary critic by empowering him to write about his own
agenda, regardless of what the text he was reviewing at the time was
actually saying. Thus the critic became the creator (albeit the
creator of a mind-numbingly convoluted type of intellectual prose).
Now the modern art critic can join in the "creative" fun as well with
conceptual art! No more subservience to the art object or to the
artist. Simply stick to expounding on conceptual art, make sure you
dismiss real art as passé, and now you too are the star! Meanwhile the
art patrons evacuate in droves. But never mind them. The art critics
are so punch drunk from finally getting to actively participate
somehow in all of this art stuff, heck, they just don't care.
b) I won't belabor this point, but when relativism tied the hands of
anyone to say, "This is good. This is bad. This is pretty. This is
ugly," the conceptualists were free to run amok.
c) If the conceptual artist wants to be an artist so badly, why
doesn't he just learn how to make real art? My hunch is that learning
how to make real art is too hard for him. Learning to communicate
something valuable and worthy, whether visually or poetically or
aurally or whatever, takes a lifetime of devotion. And even then, some
people can do it and some people can't.
Like Salieri in Amadeus, the conceptual artist is given the ability to
appreciate greatness, but he is cursed with the inability to create
greatness himself. So he takes the short track to fame and goes
conceptual. Salieri was born too soon. Scheming, jealous, petty, vain,
able to manipulate public opinion—Salieri could have written his
own ticket as a self-pimping conceptual artist, a post-modern art
critic, a pseudo-intellectual graduate professor in cross-media
studies, a cliquish gallery curator, or any number of lesser titles in
the wack-wack-wacky world of contemporary art. And Mozart? He would
have been just another populist Jon Bon Jovi.
Some would argue that conceptual art is really more like an irritant,
a conversation starter, a stunt to get people to think. That's cool.
So take it to the streets, protest, write essays, be political.
Meanwhile, give me back my tax money, stop teaching my children, and
use your galleries to send concepts down fatter and more emotive media
pipes than the thin mumbo jumbo prose of some hackneyed artist
statement written by some wannabe who never made any real art.
(If I may be allowed a value judgment.)
Copyright © 2001 Curt Cloninger. All Rights Reserved
visit www.spark-online.com for more!!
silverpoint
Conceptual art is based on nothing other than resentment of the quality that
such artists now smirkingly refer to as 'genius,' a quaint notion entirely
discredited by postmodern academics. In a lengthy interview I once read
with Marcel Duchamp from 40 years ago, he referred to the ultimate object of
his jealousy and resentment, Picasso, as being "nothing but a figurehead in
art, the same way the world of physics has Einstein." Whoa. Yes, you got
that right, the author of E=mc2 and father of the The Bomb was a mere
figurehead, no more than a cheap fame whore, no doubt, along with Picasso.
For the reasons behind this resentment, just take a long look at Duchamp's
only stab at real painting, the jaw-droppingly overrated "Nude Descending a
Staircase." He couldn't even understand cubism, much less paint it, yet
ironically this painting remains much of the cornerstone of Duchamp's
underpinnings of "seriousness." (See, he could paint, he just chose not
to....)
Conceptual art is also remarkably easy for its rote followers in the
university system to teach. So easy, in fact, that students are fully
expected to have developed a "personal signature style" of making art by
their 2nd semester, the success of which hinges on their ability to "explain
their intentions."
Conceptual art is thus far, far easier to master than even the worst,
cheapest Sunday painting, and its practitioners are made to pat themselves
on the back for their EZ-Bake Betty Crocker recipe breakthroughs that
endlessly "challenge" the unexamined, received opinions of "what art is"
that Mr. and Mrs. Philistine Art Ignorant Bourgeois Q. Public they imagine
cling to as if their very lives depend upon it, in some self concocted
fantasy world in which these breakthroughs shake bourgeois society to the
very core just as they did in 1917, when, by the way, almost no one cared,
particularly fans of the important painting of the time.
Conceptual art falls apart because it can only exist in the context of the
white gallery cube. As Robert Rauschenberg said, "This telegram is a work
of art if I say it is." Remove such art from the gallery venue, and it's
just a pile of banal, everyday junk, not "art." A real work of art can be
hung or placed anywhere and remains the same piece that can still be viewed
and appreciated as art. Put a Rembrandt in a museum, a gallery, your home,
my home, the corner saloon, the Amsterdam Mayor's office or even a trash
heap and it remains the same painting, only more or less accessible to the
public. Place a conceptual art in any of these locations, and most would
quickly see that it can only exist in the gallery or the country trash dump,
no where in between.
Art existed long, long before the museum (19th century public works and
education project) or the gallery system (storefronts for distributing
modernist art outside of the old-style French Salon system.) Folks who only
know art in this context can recite all the crap that they like about the
contextuality of these venues and other outlays of pure verbal diarrhea,
but that's all guff. That the gallery system itself has produced nothing
new nor of the least importance in decades shows that its role from 100
years ago is long defunct.
"Ricardo Pontes" <ricard...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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Paintstaines
faulty wiring, but hey, never thought it was for real. Now I know better. What
can one say about these things? Someone tosses a cross into a glass of urine,
or gnaws upon a very large block of chocolate/lard to form abstracted shapes,
or maybe piles a blockade of cinder blocks for the 'Aisle no. 3' of Home Despot
. . . what is all this, anyway? Art? Well, call it what you will, though what
art SHOULD be and should NOT be are always up to the individual. Maybe we
should ask the public, and takes a democratic, majority-rules vote on these
matters, and not let the anal/misguided critics and greed mongers serve us up
with these cholesterol-laden attempts at personal expression. Instead, mayhap
the capite censi can provide the world with a REAL idea of what art is.
BTW, I encourage comments on this article ; )
Howard Haigh
Just because somebody works in a computer science department, it doesn't
mean they know nothing about art.
Here's an example of how you can be into science/technology/art - I took a
degree in astronomy at University College London (graduated with a B.Sc. in
1978); later spent 17 years working in the financial computing sector; now
in my final year of a fine art B.A. where my chosen media area is
photo-derived painting (currently in the grisaille style of painting).
Don't jump to conclusions!
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