Few artistic actions have attracted a lot controversy and debate as conceptual art. It ought to come as no surprise, then, that conceptual art can cause frustration or vexation – to lift difficult and typically even annoying questions is exactly what conceptual artwork basically aspires to do. In reacting strongly to conceptual artwork we are, in some essential sense, playing right into its arms. For example, Yves Klein is usually seen as painter and efficiency artist linked with Nouveau réalisme.
We are, in other words, requested to combine the idea of art as concept with the declare that we will, as spectators, convey a completely new and contemporary interpretation onto an paintings that’s nothing but an idea which, by definition, needs to be about or concerned with something. First, data yielded by artwork could be about the artwork – not only the strategies employed, the work’s historical past and tradition, and so on, but additionally the meaning and ideas that the work conveys. If some vital resemblance to such a paradigmatic case is noticed, we will rightly call the object of our scrutiny a work of art.
On the standard conception, a definition is one thing that gives us with crucial and adequate conditions for some factor x to be F, in order that, for example, it is a vital and sufficient situation for a quantity to be a good number that it’s (i) an integer and (ii) divisible by two. Conceptual artwork is very broad term, and it contains plenty of totally different artwork practices.
In distinction to the formalists who didn’t query the obtained idea of art, the role of the artist was to query the very notion that art had to be an object. The most important philosophical query highlighted by conceptual art in this context, then, is the next: ‘Does artwork really need to be aesthetic, and, if so, in what sense?’. It wasn’t solely the Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language that influenced conceptual art movement, but in addition poststructuralist and postmodern philosophers, particularly French ones, such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and many others. Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A characteristic way wherein conceptual art explores the boundaries of the art work is by a strategy of questioning where the realm of the creative ends and that of utility begins. Paul Wood’s Conceptual Art is essential reading for anyone who desires to understand exactly how and why exhibitions of contemporary artwork have come to include something and all the things—from pickled sharks to mass-produced bogs, piles of garbage to multi-display screen movies.