Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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its bad conscience. Exhibitionism and public distress are therefore the final indicators that this
work is art at all, in the serious sense of the past. Nothing in either its actual social content or
its mimetic appearance can really establish this any longer. Rather, in its rueful immobilization
before the mechanisms of falsification of language (under the perspective of neo-capitalism) it
represents the terminus-point of serious modern art.
However, in its very immobilization, conceptual art reflects the emergence of certain
significant preconditions for the development of revolutionary ideas in society. The reemergence
of critical social thought into currency in America in the later 1960s, after a long
period of eclipse and suppression, indicates that a new stage in the social struggle as a whole
was germinating at that time. The period of the stabilization of imperialism behind the U.S.
dollar, which began in 1944–45—the so-called “post-war era”—had reached its end with the
dollar crises of the late 60s and early 70s. The current period of uncontrollable world financial
destabilization and political conflict had begun. With the end of that era of stabilization based
upon inflationary “credit” economic policies, there also ends the basis upon which all the ruling
class’ cultural strategies of control in the realm of ideas and representations could function.
Essentially, the termination of the period of paper-money prosperity and co-optation through
various funding schemes dates from around 1970, although the effects of this basic transformation
were (generally) sufficiently mediated that they could be ignored within the art world
until recently. “Reaganomics” and the wholesale assault on all the social and cultural institutions
which owe their existence to the post-war combination of New Deal corporatism and
inflationary public spending on culture are making it clear that the cultural presuppositions of
two or three generations of artists have entered a period of fundamental crisis.
Conceptual art’s attempts at a new social art in the early 1970s must be seen in the
context of these developments, which placed enormous obstacles in the way of the directions
those artists wished to pursue. Thus, the inadequacy of their artistic formulation of these issues
is a profound and decisive one. The failures of conceptual art, measured against the possibilities
the movement had only glimpsed, are, even as failures, the most incisive reflection of the gap
which had opened in the historical and political memory of modernism after 1939.
This failed and unresolved aspect of conceptualism remains crucial. The movement appears
today above all as incomplete. Its first response to the political upheaval which began in
the 1960s, was an appropriation of mechanical and commercial techniques in an assault upon
“Art,” and constitutes the basis of both its radicalism and its faculty of historical memory. But
insofar as it was unable to reinvent social content through its socialization of technique, it
necessarily fell prey to the very formalism and exhibitionism it had begun by exposing (though