Level 2 RC 07 — Conceptual Art: Is It Really Art?

Often the skeptical gallery-goer or the classically trained painter asks two basic questions when faced with conceptual art: Is this practice art at all, given that it may consist of nothing more than an instruction, a photograph of an event, or a typed statement? And, granting that such work is accepted as art of a new type, is it not merely a cold intellectual exercise, devoid of the feeling that art is supposed to carry? As Lucy Lippard notes in her study Six Years, two questions recur whenever art is discussed: (a) what, if anything, is actually being communicated by the object or gesture in question, and (b) what mental and material processes are involved in producing and receiving a given work. The long-standing popular notion of art as a crafted object—a canvas, a sculpture, something made skillfully by hand—is, naturally, still the nineteenth-century notion, from an age when painters and sculptors themselves described their labor in those terms. But since the middle of the twentieth century many artists have preferred a more expansive definition of the art object, epitomised in Sol LeWitt's remark that "the idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product." Accepting this more characteristic mid-century view of what constitutes an artwork will at once bring the skeptical viewer closer to an understanding of, and a more sympathetic response to, conceptual practice, even if the forms it takes will remain unfamiliar to him.

A communication problem, however, will still remain. The principal obstacle that conceptual art presents to the public, in relation to how meaning is conveyed, is that its practitioners are working in a new vocabulary of gesture . . . where terms like 'dematerialization', 'instruction-based execution', 'documentation-as-object', and so on are substitutes (or rough equivalents) for the traditional concepts of composition, brushwork, and craftsmanship. Once the new procedures of conceptual practice are properly grasped by the viewer, the barriers between him and the work he confronts will fall away.

The conceptual mode has, of course, tempted many kinds of practitioners to try their hand at it .But the serious-minded conceptual artist approaches the practice with a far more rigorous understanding of what she is doing. Although she is capable of producing conventionally skillful drawings or objects, she believes that it is in the exploration of forms native to the idea itself that the aesthetic value of the new practice resides. And, deliberately, she commits herself to this exploration.

The second objection commonly raised against conceptual art is rather more forgivable. When critics complain—sometimes quite forcefully—of the 'coldness' of this practice, they seem to overlook that the artist is the one who conceives the instruction, selects the materials or the absence of them, stages the documentation, arranges the typography of the statement, determines what will and will not be included, and settles the overall shape of the piece down to its smallest particular.

Q1. What relation does the "communication problem" mentioned in paragraph 2 have to the questions that the author recounts at the beginning of the passage?

A) The communication problem is what allows us to see conceptual art as art, because art must be difficult to understand.

B) Unfamiliar vocabulary and procedures might get in the way of our seeing conceptual art as art, but this can be overcome.

C) None; they are unrelated to one another and belong to different discussions entirely.

D) Its unfamiliar "vocabulary of gesture" and novel terms mean that we cannot see conceptual art as art, since it does not employ traditional artistic concepts.

Q2. From the context in which it is placed, the phrase "native to the idea itself" in paragraph 3 suggests which one of the following?

A) Generic

B) Intrinsic

C) Indescribable

D) Unaesthetic

Q7. The goal of the author over the course of this passage is to:

A) defend conceptual art from certain common charges.

B) differentiate between conceptual art and other forms of art.

C) defend the "serious-minded conceptual artist" from Lippard and LeWitt.

D) differentiate the modern artist from the nineteenth-century artist.

Q3. The mention of Sol LeWitt's remark in the first paragraph does all the following EXCEPT:

A) help us determine which objects are art and which are not.

B) complicate our notion of what is required for something to count as art.

C) allow us to classify conceptual art as art.

D) respond to and expand upon earlier understandings of art.