Conceptual Art: A Beginner’s Guide
Sometimes beautiful, sometimes exasperating, always fascinating
Some art movements — like Impressionism — inspire a type of elation in their audience. Other movements bring out cynicism and distrust. Conceptual Art tends to fall into the latter category.
Conceptual Art remains, for some, the death-knell of all sensible thinking about creativity. The idea that a work of art can be made merely by stating an idea, not requiring an artistically crafted object but reliant on concepts alone, leaves some people feeling — well, hard-done by.
But this is to underestimate the virtues of the conceptual movement. I want to argue that Conceptual Art is full of creative verve and artistic depth. It is, above all, an arena where the world around us can be refashioned, awakening within us a new sensitivity to perceptual possibility.
This is absurd…
It is common for viewers of Conceptual Art to wonder if the objects on display are perpetrating some sort of hoax, or at least sharing an inside joke that the rest of us are not allowed to understand.
