Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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regarding patterns of legitimation and consumption are the very means by which individuals
surrender their critical faculties to that system.
A certain ideological inversion or mystification which Marx calls false consciousness is
apparent in the very fact that in discussing art, we commonly describe the sphere of influence
in the following manner: as one moving outward from the individual artist, who, acting out of
personal feelings or convictions, expresses himself/herself by way of a statement, traditionally
in the form of a discrete work or art product, the social recognition and validation of which is
dependent on some internal properties, termed “quality,” which bear upon its visual or historical
characteristics, outward through a system of institutions responsive to its self-evident merit;
which in turn circulate and promote the work accordingly, to the benefit of all those culturally
refined and sensitive enough to partake of its virtues. Hence the artist, as well as his product
and the abstract sphere of his influence, are assumed “transcendent,” that is, somehow responsive
to and effective of abstract psychic and social conditions somewhat removed from the
mundane conditions of “everyday life.” The historical, social, and psychological factors which
bear upon the artist are viewed from the perspective of predominantly after-the-fact analysis,
the domain of various somewhat less “transcendent” (presumably more “objective”) specialists
who interpret and speculate on the myriad social and historical influences and implications
manifest in the personal history, life style and oeuvre of the particular subject under study—
those factors which bear upon and are implicit in the process of validation or interpretation
seldom being taken into account. The art work as a symbolic token of the struggle of the
individual artist and the spiritual and social dilemmas which that individual struggle in turn
reflects, becomes in a sense a sanctified cultural relic, presumably embodying in itself some
elusive, imaginative spirit.
One wonders, of course, why it is the tokens of struggle toward meaning and not the
struggle itself to which we respond (or how much spirit we can touch upon when these tokens
become the stock in trade of a sophisticated cultural elite). That this conception is naive and
idyllic and totally out of keeping with the rather more complex situation in which cultural
phenomena emerge, develop, and function ought to be readily apparent; however, attempts to
construct a more accurate basis for understanding are not without problems. One obvious
alternative model to this ideological Disneyland is of course a (very broadly speaking) materialist
schema, in which material processes, specifically the mode of production and distribution
of goods, services and capital within and amongst societies is the primary and overriding factor
of which all mental and spiritual attitudes and formulations are (consciously or unconsciously)
in large part the product. “All parts of the ideological superstructure, art being one of these,