Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) is regarded as a founding father of both Minimal and Conceptual art. And this is what happened with contemporary artwork – we were advised that Duchamp checkmated” centuries of painting. Conceptual artwork was conceived as a movement that prolonged traditional boundaries, and therefore it can be troublesome to tell apart self-conscious Conceptualism from the varied different developments in art of the 1960s. The sculptural piece below, made up of artfully organized underwear on the ground, and selling for 1000’s, typifies the seemingly thrown collectively pressure of conceptual artwork people object to. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966-1972, New York: Praeger.
If we see them as doing completely different things, we will like what both do. John is a standard musical artist, and Yoko, of course, is a conceptual artist. It does so, on the one hand, by postulating ever more complicated objects as candidates for the status of ‘art work’, and, however, by distancing the task of the artist from the precise making and manipulating of the creative material. On the other hand, the rejection of aesthetics cannot be the explanation for claiming that conceptual art is nihilistic. Under the terms of the licence …
