Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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remarkable to pick up the ball and run with it if everyone thinks you’re playing soccer. Even then
you’re still playing games.
3. In “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International (October 1969), conclusion.
4. From “There is just one Painting: Art-as-art dogma, part XIII,” Artforum (March 1966).
5. “The quality of art depends on inspired, felt relations or proportions as on nothing else. There is
no getting round this. A simple, unadorned box can succeed as art by virtue of these things, and
when it fails as art it is not because it is merely a plain box, but because its proportions, or even its
size, are uninspired, unfelt . . . . The superior work of art, whether it dances, radiates, explodes,
or barely manages to be visible (or audible or decipherable), exhibits, in other words, rightness of
‘form.’” (The degree of progress made in formalist criticism can be judged by comparing
Greenberg’s use of the concept of “rightness of form” in 1968 with Clive Bell’s of “significant form”
some 55 years earlier. Both usages imply that, in the face of “inspiration,” linguistic precision
must ultimately bow to mystification.) The passage quoted is from Greenberg’s “Avant-garde Attitudes—New
Art in the Sixties,” the John Power Lecture in Contemporary Art, delivered at the University
of Sydney on 17 May 1968 and published by the Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1969. The
above passage is immediately followed by a surely wrong-headed account of Duchamp’s intentions.
It seems to be a characteristic enterprise of the formalist critics to put down “minimal” art on
the basis of the misinterpreted intentions of one “forbear” or unrepresentative representative. For
example see Fried’s use of Tony Smith’s (!) prose to put down the whole of minimal art (as if “minimal
art” were viable as an entity anyway), in “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer 1967).
6. “There are all kinds of things going on in art, but they have nothing to do with the pretensions
of a serious painter”—Ad Reinhardt (see note 1).
7. Because there have been a lot of artists by now who have labored to make the point. It’s a
long list and starts with Duchamp if not earlier. In scorning the “visual thrill” in Courbet’s work
I don’t think Duchamp necessarily meant that he thought Courbet a bad painter. Duchamp’s
critical propositions were aimed at “Art” and not at artists. L.H.O.O.Q. rasé is an underestimated
key work (and pre-empts, incidentally, most of the questions later posed by Rauschenberg’s
Erased de Kooning), but it doesn’t in any way devalue the Mona Lisa; quite the reverse: it “restores”
it as if by cleaning off layers of browned varnish—it renders it operative once more.
8. I owe this way of expressing this point to Seth Siegelaub; see “On Exhibitions and the World
at Large,” Studio International (December 1969).
9. From a talk, “Art as Art Dogma,” given at the ICA in May 1964. Transcript published in Studio
International (December 1967).
This text was published in Studio International, 179:919 (February 1970), pp. 42–43.