Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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As appealing as this picture of liberation is, however, and as consistent as it is with precedents
established within the modernist tradition, that claim has never rested easy. Emerging quite
early on, often from within conceptualism itself, a discourse of “failure” developed alongside
claims for the radical character of its criticality. This position differed from the considerable
critical response that dismissed the project wholesale, often accusing it—as pop and minimalism
had been before it—of banalizing art. 13 Those who spoke of conceptualism’s “failure”
chose their term of opprobrium specifically for its suggestion of the promise and seriousness
of purpose they held out as the movement’s mandate. 14
At issue on both sides of the question of failure was the most politicized among the
various ambitions driving conceptual art: the critique and transformation of the existing institutions
of art. 15 Museums, galleries, and auction houses, the patrons and audiences they served,
the artists and intellectuals who worked for them, and the aesthetic criteria that governed and
legitimated their social function and status, all served, from this critical perspective, as art
world outposts of the larger “establishment” called into question by the greater New Left political
culture of the 1960s. It is here that conceptual art showed its ambition to be consistent
with the avant-garde tradition: at its most focused its aim was not simply to shock the bourgeoisie
but to recast its art institutions in more democratic form. The burden for conceptualism,
the test of its own critical legitimation, thus, was the extent to which it succeeded in
challenging and transforming the functioning of that apparatus. It has been on just such
grounds that conceptualism’s most sympathetic and perceptive critics have evaluated its contribution
and raised the specter of “failure.”
An early and important critical reevaluation of conceptualism came from one of its initial,
most enthusiastic, and most influential champions, Lucy Lippard. After helping to give
definition and seriousness to the movement in 1968 by invoking the promise of renaissance—
“The studio is again becoming a study” is how she and John Chandler characterized the state
of artistic development in their inaugural review, “The Dematerialization of Art”—she concluded
her 1973 anthology of excerpts from conceptual art’s still-warm history, Six Years, with
grave doubts about the ultimate benefit of such a development. For “the most part,” she reflected
in retrospect, “the artists have been confined to art quarters, usually by choice.” Artists
were now engaged with issues and problems that extended beyond their own immediate technical
domain, but a “ghetto mentality” persisted in a “narrow and incestuous art world,” and
artists had little choice but to maintain their “resentful reliance on a very small group of dealers,
curators, critics, editors and collectors who are all too frequently and often unknowingly bound
by invisible apron strings to the ‘real world’s’ power structure.” The move from studio to study