Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

or listening to gurgling or popping sounds when I’m around art. I can do all that, even better,
with real things and if art is anything remotely like imitation of reality then I don’t like it since
I don’t like imitations.
The stuff in this show leaves you alone, more or less, and it only grabs your mind, which
is fine, and when you leave you really feel like you’ve been through something and you have a
lot of ideas, which you can think about or throw out and it doesn’t matter which you decide
to do, despite my aged philosophy professor at NYU who says that, in this day and age, drugs
have resulted in the modern condition of “intellectual perversion” because people are all hung
up on experience itself, and after all experience itself is no good if it doesn’t lead to positive
learning. Which only shows that someone should turn the old goat on but nobody will because
it’s hard to turn somebody on if they live in a closet, which he does even though they call it
University Village and he drags himself to Europe every summer and has tenure. Nothing is
going to change really in the American University until they get rid of everybody who is on
tenure. Just the fact that a college teacher would want to have tenure is enough reason to fire
him or at least disqualify him from teaching. Only the prof who doesn’t care about his job or
the false “security” it affords is in a position to recognize the real things that are happening,
but that most people cannot, must not, see.
It would be nice to compare Godard’s A Movie Like Any Other with this new exhibition
I’m writing about because there must be some pretty interesting reasons for a comparison but
the editor of this rag keeps telling me not to write about movies, for some reason, so back to
art, which is O. K. when it’s this type of art. The works in the show are ideas that are not
intended to be any more than ideas. As such they are pretty much invisible, which itself is a
good idea. We’ve suspected, for some time now, that art perhaps can be invisible and now it is.
Therefore there’s nothing to steal, nothing to damage, no images to remember later, and we
don’t have to worry about slides and lighting. If 69 contributes to the history of art invisibility,
art history students from now on will remember us fondly.
Another thing about this show is that perhaps it isn’t art and maybe it’s art criticism,
which would be something I’ve suspected all along, that the painter and sculptor have been
moving further and further away from art and in the end perhaps all that would remain is art
criticism. (. . .) What a show like this does is, in one stroke not only demolish the Museum of
Modern Art (the Whitney demolished itself last week) but all those painting courses they are
still cranking out in the “art” schools, which were doomed a decade ago but nobody noticed,
oh well it’s too bad, after spending all that money on paints and everything. (. . .)
This review was published in New York Free Press, 23 January 1969, p. 7.
gregory battcock painting is obsolete 89