Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

propositions
terry smith
1. Painting is not becoming obsolete, only less practiced by artists. The best artists who continue
to paint feel in a liberated situation—they no longer have to carry the whole weight of
artistic change and are more free to explore the infinite options still open within painting.
However, they can no longer claim for painting a special status, nor any special concessions. A
painting now has to be good/interesting as art before it is of any interest as a painting.
2. In sculpture, the closed, integrated, whole object has a function only as a freakish oddity, or
as part ofan environmental situation. The most fertile kind ofrecent sculpture (perhaps of
recent art) is open-form sculpture—not objects with a core, nor even physical elements arranged
coherently, but rather dispersed, thrown, placed, laid elements, disposed in real space.
This kind ofsculpture invokes in its perceptor a participatory sense ofhimselfas a physical
body functioning in a space continuous with that of the sculpture.
3. The basic twentieth century art program ofever-accelerating abstraction is still basic. But
the idea ofabstraction as reduction has been revealed as self-terminating, especially when it is
pegged to the notion ofeach ofthe arts separately acting to expel their “expendable conven-