Sorry for the delay in getting these notes to you.
Download Powerpoint of Contemporary Aesthetics Week 2
Read an Interview with Jeff Koons
Here's something I wrote for a previous course which connects with the topic, this was specifically about conceptual art...I hope it's useful.
What is conceptual art?
There are at least two answers:
What is conceptual art? There are at least two answers:
1) A post-Duchamp art movement that reached its zenith in the 1960s and 70s. (see Paul Wood Conceptual Art
2) Any art that is predominantly idea-based rather than created
mainly for aesthetic appreciation. This is the more colloquial sense of
the term ‘conceptual art’.
The main focus of this week’s session was
on the second of these senses of ‘conceptual art’. In a broader sense,
perhaps almost all art has some conceptual element (think of religious
art, impressionism, cubism); but only where this dominates do we
usually speak of a work as conceptual.
Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades are usually taken to be paradigms of conceptual art (in both senses above). With works such as Mark Wallinger’s A Real Work of Art (a real racehorse that he bought and put into races, but which he declared a work of art by choice of its name which was not meant to be metaphorical), there may be an aesthetic element: but what you see isn’t what you get.
The best explanation of what is going on with conceptual art is given by Arthur Danto (e.g. in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
But how can conceptual art be art? George Dickie’s first version of
his Institutional Theory of Art gives one explanation. For him a work
of art is an artifact some aspect of which has had the status of
‘candidate for appreciation’ conferred upon it by a member or members
of the artworld (by artworld he meant anyone who believed themselves to
be part of the artworld, not the social elite of curators, critics,
gallery owners, collectorsand well-known artists). These provide
necessary and sufficient conditions (pre-requisites and guarantees)
that anything is a work of art. But this is a neutral sense of ‘art’:
to say that something is a work of art implies nothing about its value.
On this theory (which has been much criticized for being
over-inclusive) it is very easy to see that, for example the minimal
intervention of selecting and signing a urinal transforms it into an
artifact, and entering it for an exhibition is an act of conferral of
status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ (further reading, including
criticism of this approach, Nigel Warburton The Art Question
Two Thoughts
1) What about the status of the
Idea in Conceptual Art? A challenge: if the ideas expressed in
conceptual art are trite or unoriginal (which they often are) does that
make the artwork trite? One possible answer is that the idea is an
element of the work of art, not its sole purpose: the ingenuity of the
way of communicating the idea is part of the work. This might be
supported by the notion that if you want to communicate a complex idea
writing a philosophy book or paper is usually better than making a work
of conceptual art that is likely to be ignored or misunderstood by
gallery goers…
2) Should we approach conceptual art with cynicism or charity? Cynicism involves a starting position that most conceptual art deals in alluding to not very profound thoughts that would be better expressed in straightforward ways, and has limited aesthetic appeal by way of consolation. Charity involves approaching these works in a more open way, starting with the working assumption that there is something worth engaging with there to be discovered. Both approaches have their dangers…
(Routledge), especially Chapter 3 'Family Resemblances'.
).