Conceptual art: what's the point?

"True, but some people manage to 'keep it real' a bit better than others. You don't see Chuck D advertising trainers. Genesis P-Orridge was notably absent from Olympics opening ceremony."

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But to accept the argument that "There is no opposition or agitation in nihilism in the art world" (while suggesting that this is not the case in the world of popular music) you need to demonstrate that all musicians keep it real better than all artists. And also that all artists are fakes from the very start, not just when projected to stratospheric levels of success.
I agree that Hirst is at the centre of the art establishment now but I don't think that's an argument for the utter vacuity of the claims of conceptual art to challenge etc There are plenty of better arguments to that effect.
There's also some debate as to whether Hirst can genuinely claim to make conceptual art.
I reckon Gen would have appeared at the Opening Ceremony if he'd been asked.

Leo said:

i presume you posted this for a laugh, right? basically, he's saying "i don't like it/get it, so it's stupid and pointless. why doesn't the artist make some 'good' art?" by his logic, the guys in basic channel are fucking idiots because they released records that essentially loop the same beat for nine minutes, and andy warhol is a moron because "empire" was a shot of the same building for eight hours.

i may not care for some art, but that doesn't make that work stupid and pointless. err, isn't that a pretty juvenile viewpoint?

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If anything, I interpret it more as saying, "I get it, and it's stupid and pointless, so I don't like it."

Is that a juvenile viewpoint? I don't know. But I could listen to Moritz von Oswald on eterna-loop, so perhaps my judgement is not to be trusted.

I think the important thing is to separate what might be a useful rule of thumb for adolescents, like, "just because you don't like it, doesn't mean that it's stupid," from a critical understanding of culture. As humans, we all want to make sense of the world around us. Part of that understanding is making judgements and trying to reason about why we feel like we do, react to things impulsively or intuitively, and don't like the stuff we don't like.

If things have no meaning in general, then it doesn't matter. Who cares about art? One jumble of materials and techniques is as good as the next. But if things do have meaning, then that meaning can be expressed. Art is part of that.

The Russian formalists had a concept called, "laying bare the device," a mechanism through which the reader could be made aware of the mechanics of storytelling through the story itself. Piero Manzoni expressed his disgust at the art world by shitting into cans. The can of shit says, "this is what I think of you." The Tate, of course, pays £20,000 for it. "A very important purchase." Indeed!

Kalb thinks modern art means something. His feelings are similar to Manzoni's. In the sale of a can of £20,000 shit, we see the art world in a microcosm, a little picture of a part of society eating its own tail, even eating its own shit. A moment that seems to encapsulate some kind of pure self-parody. It's so perfect, it almost seems, to use a cliché, like fiction. And perhaps that, too, means something...

One way that avant garde art works is by exploiting the tension between obeying the rules and subverting them. That can't go forever, though, because at some point, the rules start to lose their authority, and then it's no longer subversive. There's no more tension. It's just something that exists for its own sake, a self-licking ice cream cone.

Whether or not Damien Hirst is a rebel who was embraced by and/or embraced money and mainstream is not exactly the point -- if fact, it is questionable whether he, or his immediate contemporaries, ever were in opposition to anything. They emerged at the inevitable moment when post-modern aesthetics was swallowed whole by neo-liberalism (which made a joke of the junk neo-Marxism that underlay it).

I was pointing to the difference between Fluxus in the ‘70s and the YBAs in the ‘90s -- which is a different world, a separate impulse, morality, and reality. The ‘70s conceptualism, along with preceding and contemporaneous abstractions and diversions, Pop to Land Art and all of that, ended up providing material for a specific and rarefied art market. This was a developing circuit of artists, collectors, dealers, curators, gallery owners, critics, academics, and media producers who established and protected an extensive investment network in the ’80s that worked in compact with an ostensive radical critical discourse. An increasingly important form of merchandise turned out to be a media-packaged "fun nihilism", exemplified in the UK by Goldsmiths alumni and consummated in the Sensations exhibition. This is somehow in a lineage with and yet entirely different to Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman, although it is difficult to explain how.

I consider the end point to be Martin Creed (more than Damien Hirst) who produces clean and colourful Fluxuseque ephemera, empty of content or context. He simply lets the critical and commercial apparatus go to work and make money for him. He provides the object and the critics create the concept for him thus providing the conditions for sale. His talent is for making money from an illusion by devising a visual experience to suit a critical discourse. This is the essence of conceptual art now and is a wider condition of contemporary art in general, which must play to and by these rules.

Because this is the relevant stuff: the radical is conceptual, which is the only work worth doing. Innovate and transgress as this is the quickest, clearest way to be taken seriously by serious critics, serious collectors; it is a pass to the big international art fairs and the important downtown galleries. If you are not employing this particular visual and theoretical language you have no place at the Frieze Art Fair, which is where deals and connections make careers. (Careers, rather than bodies of work.)

The work challenges. It suggests. It celebrates. It deconstructs. It encourages unexpected links. It is an exploration. It disrupts and it undermines. It suggests and it investigates. It raises questions. It exposes and it explores. It negotiates and questions. It disrupts and it undermines as it suggests and as it negotiates. It is all about intransitive verbs that make money circulate. The ideas are no longer really there. The visual commitment is merely a game or an unspecified suggestion or an actual evasion. It is all a question of what the work is doing or is said to be doing -- not its meaning, but some alleged and obtuse critique or less direct critical activity. The visual language and media is debased or awash in technology. Fine art has no cultural urgency or function, so is replaced by this illusory circulation of ideas which manages to make money and keep the whole enterprise of galleries, criticism, and dealers going. I would say this is the condition of contemporary art rather than conceptual art, but the more you think about it, the only relevant contemporary art (the stuff that matters, makes the money, keeps the Frieze fallacy in business, say) is the conceptual, and the radically conceptual, at that.

Great comments in this thread, Craner.

Where art can possibly go from here seems like something of a conundrum. It can't go backwards, because the old forms no longer have the same meaning. They seem trite and inconsequential. But it can't really go forwards, because it has run out of road. So it just repeats the same loop, over and over, each iteration more pointless than the last, and each more obviously the result of having reached a dead end, aesthetically and intellectually. It's a bit sad, in way.

vimothy said:

Where art can possibly go from here seems like something of a conundrum. It can't go backwards, because the old forms no longer have the same meaning. They seem trite and inconsequential. But it can't really go forwards, because it has run out of road. So it just repeats the same loop, over and over, each iteration more pointless than the last, and each more obviously the result of having reached a dead end, aesthetically and intellectually. It's a bit sad, in way.

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at the risk of being the thread's annoying philistine/devil's advocate, i'd venture to say this claim has probably been made at any point in history and in most cases been proven wrong. no one in the past could imagine the new thinking and developments that came years/decades later, and as bankrupt as things might seem now, we have no idea what the future holds.

don't be such a bunch of glass-half-empty types!

This reheated dissensian debate is definitely an example of an endless looping of ideas. Perhaps it could be presented as some kind of artwork and then it really would be eating itself.

"One way that avant garde art works is by exploiting the tension between obeying the rules and subverting them. That can't go forever, though, because at some point, the rules start to lose their authority, and then it's no longer subversive."

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Yeah, as Stallabrass said, the rules, despite being broken are conveniently back in place for the next work to break them again.
I broadly agree with what Craner says - the art world is a busted flush and so is the music industry and so on and so forth, and yet, within these dead scenes I still find music or art that grabs me and moves me and makes me want to dance or whatever. Seems to be a contradiction there, as soon as you find something you like there is a natural urge to explain how and why you like it and this almost inevitably leads to one trying to fit it into a theory of art/music in general. But seeing as these all seem so depressing this process tends to either end in failure, or, worse, talk you out of liking the original thing.

As a corollary to the art-world being finished... then maybe outsider art is where true authenticity can flourish. That may or may not be true but outsider art is problematic in that art that is separate from any art world can surely not ever progress and is, almost by definition, a kind of interesting dead-end. And that's not even considering that outsider art has now become a way of packaging hitherto unsellable art together to bring it to the market....

"Outsider art is certainly interesting but becomes problematic when it becomes an official 'thing'. I mean, you can't deliberately create outsider art, can you? In fact I have a feeling you can't create outsider art if you're even aware of the concept of 'outsider art'. It's an inherently Establishment term."

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No, you can't deliberately create it but a curator or collector or whatever can gather a load of it together and label it outsider art and use that tag to sell it.

Also, I'm not sure (modern) art and (modern) music are easily and directly comparable, for two reasons.
Firstly, ordinary people consume far more music than they do art. We buy music to listen to at home, in the car, on portable players, we listen for free on Spotify and YouTube, we go to gigs and nightclubs. Sure, we might go to galleries occasionally, perhaps even buy a postcard or a print of one of the pieces, but even if we're talking about public participation with art/music, I should think the average person goes clubbing/gigging or at least puts 50p in a pub jukebox more often than they go to a gallery or art museum.
Second, there's the fact that the Western tradition of secular 'high' art stretches back to, what, the Renaissance? I mean this was around the time that people who were wealthy but weren't part of the higher aristocracy or senior clergy started commissioning and collecting art, wasn't it? Whereas before that, art was generally either monumental or religious, or else was the folk art with which people decorated everyday things. So you have a tradition of an academic high-art establishment stretching back at the very least several hundred years.
Now 'pop music', in the most general sense (meaning rock, reggae, hip-hop, r'n'b, techno, whatever) dates back roughly to the middle of the last century. Sure, before that there was Delta blues and swing and jazz, and the music hall tradition before that and so on and so on, but I think you can date the appearance of 'pop music' as such to the '50s when record players and radios started becoming things that ordinary people, and specifically young people, owned en masse. So there's been somewhat over half a century for people to have crazy new ideas, compared to half a millennium in the high-art tradition.

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Yeah, people listen to music more often than they go to art galleries - so what?
And I'd beg to differ in saying that pop music was invented in the fifties. Popular, folk music (as in music of the folk) has been around as long as art has I reckon. But even if it hasn't, again, so what?
Even if, for argument's sake, I accept that music is more popular and newer than art, what's the step from there to demonstrate that they are not parallel traditions which ultimately appear to follow the same trajectory? To me they are both made up of various movements which either claim to be the new thing or have that claim made for them by someone else. Within those movements there are innovators and leaders and hangers on etc Eventually a movement is exhausted and something else comes along and replaces it. At the moment both art and music are subservient to market capitalism and there is a constant tension between artists and movements being "real" and yet meeting the demands of the market enough to get rich (or just eat). In each case you have to exhibit an enormous amount of double-think to claim that Hirst or Lady Gaga is a rebel and yet many do.
Broadly speaking, I think that "the arts" includes art, music, film and literature. There is probably a good reason why these things have always been categorised together.

Here’s a way that maybe art and music are alike. Take jazz, for example. In the latter half of the 20th century, Jazz went through a similar process of overthrowing itself. At some point, it got to Ascension and Free Jazz and all that sort of stuff, and what more can you do with that idea really? You'll certainly never have the same impact the second, third, or fourth time around. But you can't go back and play be-bop or whatever either, because now it sounds corny and lame. So you’re stuck.

You can add strings, like Alice.

Exactly. I think this process is repeated to a greater or lesser extent in most/all art-forms. You have a few new paradigms and a few people tinkering with and refining those paradigms... and then what? One chink of light comes from the idea that those new paradigms were impossible to imagine for most people before they had arrived so you can't categorically state that another thing won't come along and redefine everything. But obviously it gets harder and harder to do within a given discipline.
But let me say again that that doesn't mean that it's not possible for individual works or whatever that you enjoy to come along even if you subscribe to this idea.