Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

of critical or art-historical thought invests him with a sole authority for illuminating past endeavors
in art. The rest is archaeology at one extreme and public relations at the other. At best
the perceptive critic informed about art history can do no more than give a literate exposition of
the effect of a current art endeavor upon our understanding of the significance of earlier work.
Art alone is engaged with other art on equal terms.
Most of what is seen as Art is just Picturesque. Picturesque situations are established by the
evidence of solutions—“formal resolution,”“style,”“character,”“brushwork”etc.—rather
than by dilemmas. 6 Everything I easily think of as a way of making art involves the picturesque.
Much writing on art is nostalgia evoked by picturesque situations. (English culture particularly
has a heavy bias in favor of the literary/scenic . . . even today. How to defeat an Eng. Lit.
education? How to be anyone but Wordsworth?)
The major problem is never how to do something; it’s always what to do. Those who are
concerned principally with how to do it have got presentation confused with art. (At the secondhand
level of course this also applies to critics.) There’s no excuse for this nowadays; 7 which is to
say that anyone involved principally in how to do it can be taken as having opted for convention
rather than creation: i.e. in the end you know you’ll forget them. Criticism concerned
primarily with resolution does more harm than good in the end: because the problem becomes
more important than what it’s about, 8 and bad artists are promoted because they have the “right”
concerns (even long after these concerns have any relevance to art). This is yet another way
of avoiding confrontation with art. Ideas pursued beyond their currency in art become ideas
concerning the picturesque. (E.g. most formalist criticism is now defense of the picturesque.)
Criticism never holds good for long.
The only alternative to criticism is art.
(When somebody says, “Well, where do you go from here or where do you go from here?”
I say, “Well, where do you want to go?” There’s no place to go. . . .
—AdReinhardt. 9 )
NOTES
1. From an interview with Ad Reinhardt by Phyllisann Kallick, published in Studio International
(December 1967).
2. An anti-art gesture only has iconoclastic significance within the context of art. It’s only
charles harrison notes towards art work 207