Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art emerged in the mid-1960s as a direct challenge to the idea that art must result in a discrete, saleable object. Building on precedents set by Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade Fountain and John Cage's silent 1952 composition 4′33″, artists including Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, and the collective Art & Language argued that the idea behind a work mattered more than its physical execution. LeWitt's 1967 dictum that 'the idea becomes a machine that makes the art,' realized through his instruction-based wall drawings, epitomized this shift, as did Kosuth's 1965 One and Three Chairs, which presented a real chair beside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of 'chair' to interrogate the relationship between object, image, and language. The term itself traces to Henry Flynt's 1961 coinage of 'concept art.' Conceptualism developed simultaneously in New York, London, and Latin America, often carrying anti-commercial and socio-political charges — Seth Siegelaub's dematerialized 1969 exhibitions and Hans Haacke's institutional critiques exemplified its resistance to the gallery-and-collector system. Lucy Lippard's 1973 book Six Years documented the movement's 'dematerialization' of the art object between 1966 and 1972. Though its first wave waned by the late 1970s, Conceptual Art's legacy is arguably the most consequential of any postwar movement: it legitimized installation, performance, text, and instruction as art forms, directly shaping the Young British Artists and Turner Prize-winning work by Martin Creed and Simon Starling, and underwrites the broadly 'post-conceptual' condition of contemporary art.