Concept

Conceptual art

Overview

Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Tony Godfrey, author of Conceptual Art (Art & Ideas) (1998), asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art, a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, Art after Philosophy (1969). The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg's vision of Modern art during the 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Art & Language, Joseph Kosuth (who became the American editor of Art-Language), and Lawrence Weiner began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible (see below). One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects.

Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, in popular usage, particularly in the United Kingdom, "conceptual art" came to denote all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. One of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself. As the artist Mel Bochner suggested as early as 1970, in explaining why he does not like the epithet "conceptual", it is not always entirely clear what "concept" refers to, and it runs the risk of being confused with "intention". Thus, in describing or defining a work of art as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as "conceptual" with an artist's "intention".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

We have the experience every day that the ideas we would fain recall do not come, and that they appear of themselves when we are no longer thinking of them. If that does not prevent us from thinking that we are their efficient cause, what reliance shall one place on the proof of feeling, which to M. Jacquelot appears so conclusive? Does our authority over our ideas more often fall short than our authority over our…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
The author is tied to Conceptual art in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
§ 59. _Of Beauty as the symbol of Morality_ Intuitions are always required to establish the reality of our concepts. If the concepts are empirical, the intuitions are called _examples_. If they are pure concepts of Understanding, the intuitions are called _schemata_. If we desire to establish the objective reality of rational concepts, _i.e._ of Ideas, on behalf of theoretical cognition, then we are asking for…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Conceptual art is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
The _Idea_ is the unity that falls into multiplicity on account of the temporal and spatial form of our intuitive apprehension; the _concept_, on the contrary, is the unity reconstructed out of multiplicity by the abstraction of our reason; the latter may be defined as _unitas post rem_, the former as _unitas ante rem_. Finally, we may express the distinction between the Idea and the concept, by a comparison, thus…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
Close in meaning to Conceptual art; the term itself is not named.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Aesthetics.

Explore Conceptual art in the interactive graph →