conceptual art

90 years ago, Mar­cel Duchamp did some­thing kind of funny by pre­sent­ing a uri­nal as if it were legit­i­mate art.

The art world responded by repeat­ing the same joke, with slight vari­a­tions, over and over, while pre­tend­ing to take itself seri­ously in the process. Much money was made by sell­ing ran­dom objects to rich suck­ers. Now the whole joke may finally be start­ing to fall a bit flat.

Den­nis Dut­ton writes in the New York Times:

The appre­ci­a­tion of con­tem­po­rary con­cep­tual art, on the other hand, depends not on imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able skill, but on how the work is sit­u­ated in today’s intel­lec­tual zeit­geist. That’s why look­ing through the his­tory of con­cep­tual art after Duchamp reminds me of pag­ing through old New Yorker car­toons. Jokes about Cadil­lac tail­fins and early fax machines were once amus­ing, and the same can be said of con­cep­tual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 dec­la­ra­tion that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a def­i­n­i­tion of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s med­i­cine cab­i­nets. Future gen­er­a­tions, no longer engaged by our art “con­cepts” and unable to divine any spe­cial skill or emo­tional expres­sion in the work, may lose inter­est in it as a medium for finan­cial spec­u­la­tion and rel­e­gate it to the realm of his­tor­i­cal curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regard­ing med­i­cine cab­i­nets, vac­uum clean­ers and dead sharks as reck­less invest­ments. Some­where out there in col­lec­tor­land is the unlucky guy who will be the last one hold­ing the vac­uum cleaner, and won­der­ing why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodi­gious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with sur­pris­ing skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jew­elry shop win­dow and stop, trans­fixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped pre­cious stone. Our dis­tant ances­tors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it —even before they could put their love into words.