Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

In the late sixties and early seventies in New York there was somewhat of a ‘junta’ atmosphere in
the art world. The Greenberg gang was attempting with great success to initiate an Official History
gestalt, and there wasn’t much generosity toward us ‘novelty’ artists that didn’t happen to fit
into the prescribed historical continuum. 8
Kosuth was not alone in targeting Greenberg and particularly his heir Michael Fried: such was
the burden or complex of an entire generation. 9
Conceptualism’s promise is best understood in relation to this particular Oedipal struggle.
Kosuth’s 1970 statement, “Conceptual art annexes the function of the critic . . . ; [it] makes
the middle-man unnecessary,” 10 is the best-known and most concise expression of the ambition,
but the emphasis on artists realizing their autonomy by taking over the role of the critic
had already been introduced as a reason-for-being of conceptualism by Sol LeWitt in the opening
sentences of his 1967 manifesto for the movement, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” “I
will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art,” he wrote, responding to
a sympathetic editor who shared his opposition to “the notion that the artist is a kind of ape
that has to be explained by the civilized critic.” There is “a secret language that art critics use
when communicating with each other through the medium of art magazines,” LeWitt insisted,
“but I have not discovered any [artist] who admits to doing this kind of thing” or to making
work that fits the critics’ categories. The “idea itself” (“as much a work of art as any finished
product”)not only “eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective,” it also presents
the work of art in already-interpreted form, obviating the need for a professional interpreter
or critic. 11
More than any other of conceptualism’s distinctive qualities, thus, it was its intellectualism
that made it radical and empowered its momentary takeover of the institutions of art.
The burden of the endless philosophizing about the meaning of art, the burden of the shift
from object-based aestheticism to a language- and theory-based anti-aestheticism, the burden
of the rejection of the street coding of happenings, the commercial coding of pop, and the
industrial coding of minimalism in favor of academic philosophical, literary, and scientific
associations, was to aggressively usurp the authority to interpret and evaluate art assumed to
be the privileged domain of scholarly critics and historians. Such was the liberation on offer
from conceptualism; such was the insurrection it promised a generation of artists and that
allowed it the claim, as Gregory Battcock gushed, that “everything that happened in 1968, at
Columbia and Paris and all other symbolic places . . . really meant something and . . . really
will result in something,” because its significance had already been realized in conceptual art. 12
blake stimson the promise of conceptual art xli