Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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is probably not worth considering as art. And Conceptual Art is nothing if there is no power
to its claim to be occupying the space of art. What I mean by this is that Conceptual Art is not
art at all unless its objects are intentional objects under some description; and it is not art of
any critical interest unless it enforces recognition of a transformation amongst that range of
descriptions under which something may be seen as intentional.
There are of course those who would claim that the radicalism of Conceptual Art lay
not in its occupation but rather in its displacement of the space of art—a displacement effected
precisely by breaking down the barriers between the aesthetic and the political and between
the over-specialized high arts and the more notionally “popular” (through in fact simply more
readily distributable) arts of publicity. From this point of view the concern for quality is seen
as a form of abnegation of the requirement of effectiveness. This argument is all very well, but
the works at issue tend either to establish themselves in a thoroughly conventional world of art
or to be absorbed without aesthetic remainder into the larger world they purport to invade.
(Artists cited in support of such arguments include Burgin, Haacke, Holzer and Kruger.) In
the first case the works thus represented are subject to whatever institutional or fashionable
criteria may happen to prevail. In the second case they do indeed put themselves beyond the
concerns of qualitative judgement, but only by failing to be of interest as intentional objects
under some critically significant description. In neither case do they offer any novel address or
alternative to the requirement of depth in art. This is to say that they do nothing to resist the
form of manipulative agency associated with the image of the beholder.
If a case is to be made for the art-historical significance of Conceptual Art, it seems clear
that it will not be enough either to reproduce the protocols of late-Modernist aesthetics under
a new Post-Minimalist disguise, or to replace judgement with claims for non-cognitive effectiveness.
The case will have to be one which, while it resists the conventions of quality associated
with the ideology of Modernism, nevertheless admits the possibility—and difficulty—of evaluating
works of Conceptual Art as intentional objects under a range of relevant descriptions.
And this will entail some assessment of the readings—and not simply of the categorymistakes—which
works of Conceptual Art avail. The demand for intelligent readings rather
than involuntary responses is still instinct in those works of Conceptual Art which have remained
interesting (and in that sense “stood the test of time”). That demand should not now
be replaced or forgotten in the name of some automatic art-historical authenticity.
This is not a plea for the restoration of connoisseurship on some already-discredited
basis (such as the self-serving fiction that art speaks for itself to the innately sensitive). Rather
it is to affirm that need for interpretative reading (Verstehen) which was implicitly asserted in