Conceptual art

Hi David,

Obviously, the urinal joke isn't all that deep and even the best joke becomes stale after nearly a century of constant reference. But, let's face it: Dada has been around for a while now. And, it's not going away any time soon. So, these conditions require my inner artist to ask: Why this is the case? Has the cynicism and moral decay of modern art lessened or increased since the New York Armory show? How much responsibility should be placed on collectors and critics? We should remember that commodity critiques on art objects (Hirst's motive) are much younger than the origins of found object art. So, a shark in a tank of preservative does have some conceptual relationship to a century-old urinal joke, but the urinal has a lot more in common with other Duchampian art that declared the death of all narrative art. Disclaimer: I don't use urinals or any other found objects in my personal art. I paint in wax with varying degrees of representation. But, I don't have an issue using found objects as a learning and conceptual tool, especially if some formalism is tied into the work. My complaint is with art programs that teach four years of conceptual art to their students. That's expensive…ouch!

Actually, the medium is photography, not piss. Is the Piss Christ really even properly defined as “conceptual art?” I’m not so sure. My understanding of conceptual art is that a large part of it involves questioning the object as a commodity - thus it often involves things that can’t be sold, like performance pieces, impermanent things, or earthworks like the spiral jetty, the lightning field, or the running fence.

Like I said, a lot of conceptual art doesn’t do much for me, but a lot of painting doesn’t either (I like your work, BTW, or I wouldn’t keep checking in on your web site). I will give anything a fair chance, something that comes from my art history background. They always told us to look at the piece and think about it before passing judgment. I do end up shrugging my shoulders and turning away lots of times, but some conceptual art is actually quite beautiful, and not simple to create. I thought Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho was pretty interesting, for example. I like what I’ve seen of James Lee Byer’s work. There was another piece I saw once at the Portland Oregon art museum by an artist whose name I can’t recall that was very moving, a video installation in a dark corridor with multiple spots where you would stop to see images of various people from a distance facing away from you (a pretty woman, a young boy, an old man, a policeman, etc.). When you stood there, the person in the image would turn around and walk slowly toward you until they reached life size, where they’d stop walking. They appeared to be pleading, attempting to communicate something, but there was no sound. When you stepped away, the image person turned away and walked back to where they were. My description doesn’t do it justice, but it was very moving, enough that I remember it quite strongly over a decade after I saw it. The images were black and white and a little shadowy, like it was something you saw in a dream.

My own feeling is that conceptual art is like all art in that it basically follows Sturgeon’s law that 90% of everything is crap. But there is good conceptual art (whatever that is) out there by artists who have worked very hard to do what they do.