User:Lucian Wester notes on Conceptual art

Conceptual art 1962-1969: from the aesthetic of administration to critique of institutions. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

(from: Conceptual art: a critical anthology. Edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson)

‘Because the proposal inherent in Conceptual art was to replace the object of spatial perception experience by linguistic definition alone (the work as analytic proposition), it thus constituted the most consequential assault on the status of that object: its visuality, its commodity status, and its form of distribution.’ (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh p.515)

‘Just as the readymade had negated not only figurative representation, authenticity, and authorship while introducing repetition and the series (i.e, the law of industrial production) to replace the studio aesthetic of the handcrafted original, Conceptual Art came to displace even that image of the mass-produced object and its aestheticized forms in Pop Art, replacing an aesthetic of industrial production and consumption with an aesthetic of administrative and legal organization and institutional validation.’ (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh p.520)

‘By ultimately dismantling both along with the conventions of visuality inherent in them, they firmly established an aesthetic of administration.’ (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh p.525)

(One of the great goals of conceptual art was to deobjectify the work of art, in which they didn’t fully succeed for several reasons but what they did succeed in was to establish the aesthetic of administration.)

Languish is used for the first time within paintings by the cubist. Conceptualist made a rigorous investigation to the conventions of both author, spectator and the traditional paradigms surrounding visuality. Conceptualism merges at the same time when new theories dealing with linguistics are established. (semiotics)

‘In the absence of any specifically visual qualities and due to the manifest lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction, all the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment – of taste and of connoisseurship – have been programmatically voided. The result of this that the definition of the aesthetic becomes on the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste).’ (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh p.519)

Duchamp’s ready-mades gave the institutions more authority, an object placed within a gallery becomes art.