Digital BW, The Print

on 10/23/01 9:02 AM, Julian Thomas at julianthomas@... wrote:

>> So do you disagree with the notion that the concept alone can be the
>> work?
>> 
> 
> yes, i think that there has to be a work-object for the viewer to engage
> with. A lot of the stuff I saw at the yoko ono was therapy IMO 'draw a green
> square on a canvea' 'hammer a nail into some wood' very dated. Musical
> equivalent of bad John Cage

think of what the word 'art' actually means outside this context

as in 'the artful dodger'

as in 'artifice'

as in 'artefact'

as in 'arts and crafts'

as in 'the art of the brewer'

This tells you, in my view anyway, that art is more than concept. It has to
do with something realized through physical skill and intellectual insight.
Both of those terms are necessary, or you have on the one hand a fine piece
of crafstmanship and on the other an unrealized idea.

Hirst's stuff is interesting because there clearly IS a craft element to
what he does, even if it is the craft of the embalmer.

The thing that bothers me most about conceptual art is that when you examine
the concepts they are frequently totally banal. You can see this in the
flatulent curatorspeak that surrounds them, which attempts to dress flawed
and uninteresting ideas in polysyllables.

Somebody said "there is nothing so mysterious as a fact plainly expressed",
and indeed when conceptual art (or indeed any art) does express a fact
plainly, it can be very powerful.

Too often however the 'art' part of conceptual art is simply a way of
obscuring what was not a very original, brilliant or striking idea in the
first place. Just as, IMO, the language of some of the French semioticians
like Derrida obscures a meaning which once disentangled doesn't stand up to
analysis. Compare and contrast with Wittgenstein or Barthes, who can amaze
you with a simple sentence, just as Paul Klee can amaze you with a line.

-- 
John Brownlow

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com