Doing research for my Art After Modernism essay. This is the last page of "Late Modern: The Visual Arts since 1945." I found it interesting. The beginning of the first paragraph reads:
"'Pure' conceptual art - an art of statements only, or an art in which the audience is asked to find its satisfaction by following the creator step by step in his thought processes, without asking that these should take a form more concrete than words..."
My feelings towards Conceptual art are mixed. It's safe to say i feel "weird" about the subject. On one hand it's fascinating to study the ideas in a university course setting. On the other it alienates people in an odd way that produces hostile attitudes towards art in general. And then there's the whole mess about to what extent a concept can be considered art if its main form is cognitive instead of physical/emotional.
bahh it makes my head hurt.
Any thoughts?
sarah xoxo
What's Art?
ReplyDeleteFine art has been increasingly cognitive since the 19th century, when Courbet and then the Impressionists, and then Cezanne and all started making paintings that were more than just representations of things of basic stories. I think the physical/emotional can (in my opinion should be) loaded into conceptual designs as well... but art has to be more than just an image to move someone for more than 30 seconds.
ReplyDeleteAs for hostile attitudes; alot of the great masters like Mattisse were hated in their time for not being pretty. Damien Hirst may be thoroughly reviled, but his "art made out of valuable things" was the art debate of the 90's and early 2000s. Textbooks will remember him, and the way he took post-modernism to it's extremes just before the party ended.