Buchloh’s historic account of conceptualism has turn into a canonical reference, one which this debate aims to overview. Obviously, this position seems difficult to defend within the case of conceptual art: when we are dealing with items resembling Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, the place the inner evidence is clearly inadequate to discern that it is an art work in the first place, it seems that we have to know that Warhol meant the containers to be seen qua artwork, at the very least.
Although the use of textual content in artwork was nothing new by the 1960s – textual content appears alongside other visible parts in Cubist paintings, for instance – artists resembling Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari adopted textual content as the chief component of a visible murals. From the vantage of conceptual art, visible artwork is perceived as quaint handicraft confined to two-dimensional rectangles; and from visible artwork’s standpoint conceptual art is visually innocuous, empty novelty, and never even art. Art doesn’t exist on aesthetic grounds and has no inherent or intrinsic properties.
Conceptual artists were influenced by the brutal simplicity of Minimalism, however they rejected Minimalism’s embrace of the conventions of sculpture and painting …