Conceptual art: what's the point?

IdleRich

IdleRich
"You can add strings, like Alice."
That's the tinkering bit isn't it? Not to knock it, I don't think that the most groundbreaking work is often the most enjoyable in a given scene. Stuff that is always trying to move things on misses the chance to consolidate or, more simply, to actually be good.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Another parallel - surely private press records are almost exact analogues for outsider art? Often made by eccentrics and collected by those who want to reject the realities of the mainstream and its canon.
 

Leo

Well-known member
jerry lee lewis and elvis shocked the world and caused outrage to the status quo. i'll bet few people at the time imagined anyone could possibly take it a step further...and then a couple of decades later, the sex pistols did just that. who's to say what will happen in another 20 years?
 

vimothy

yurp
That's a fair question, Leo. Since nobody knows the future, who's to say that it won't be just like the past?

I guess the worry is that "going one step" further has become an end in itself; that there's no there there any more.

Music and art both became caught up in the great drive to Change the World. People wanted to tear the old order down and art and music were instrumental in that process. This made them seem glamorous and exciting, romantic and relevant; above all, it made them seem important.

The old order is pretty dead by now. That doesn’t mean you can’t dig up its corpse and hang it again, of course, just for old time’s sake. But it does mean that there’s no longer any struggle for art to attach to. It’s not exciting and dangerous, it’s nostalgic. The corpse isn’t fighting back.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I guess the worry is that "going one step" further has become an end in itself; that there's no there there any more."
That's what I was trying to say above.

"jerry lee lewis and elvis shocked the world and caused outrage to the status quo. i'll bet few people at the time imagined anyone could possibly take it a step further...and then a couple of decades later, the sex pistols did just that. who's to say what will happen in another 20 years?"
Also what I was trying to say above.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, people listen to music more often than they go to art galleries - so what?

So music has greater mass appeal than visual art. Most popular singers and musicians didn't study music at university. It's not academized in the way that art is.

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.

Yeah of course, but I specifically meant pop music in the sense of the super-spectrum that derives largely from black American R'n'B and soul music of the 1950s and gave rise, via rock'n'roll, to basically all modern guitar music on one hand, and, via funk and disco, to hip-hop and dance music on the other (with a secondary stream running from reggae and ska through dub and dancehall to hardcore, jungle, grime and so on).

So yeah, there was popular music a hundred, two hundred, however many hundred years ago (as distinct from classical music), but is there really much continuity between what (say) working-class Londoners listened to a century ago and what they listen to now?

But even if it hasn't, again, so what?

Well my very tentative and probably wrong thesis is this: that modern art (be it conceptual or not) is the latest incarnation of a highly academic, Establishment-sponsored tradition of high (as opposed to folk) art that goes back centuries, whereas pop music (in the modern sense) derives largely from various forms that became popular with young people, first in America and later elsewhere, about sixty years ago. So modern visual art has simply had that much longer for people to have ideas.

My other main point is that self-consciously challenging music is not mainstream in the way that self-consciously challenging art is. If you can make a very broad and general equivalence between a pop song you can dance and sing along to and a painting that most people would consider 'nice' then you can make a corresponding one between very 'unmusical' music and very abstruse art. A room with a light turning on and off won the Turner Prize, but Merzbow does not win Grammy Awards.
 
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I don't think you can compare pop music with conceptual art. I'd rather say that contemporary art is much more accepted than its equivalent in music, there are certainly a lot more people walking through Tate Modern, Guggenheim, MOMA etc. than attending Wandelweiser performances. Of course, you still hear the occasional 'my three year old daughter could do that' with modern art, but in general this stuff is a big, fully established segment of the art world. But if you look at most music programming, even the usual new music heavyweights (Stockhausen, Cage etc.) don't appear that often.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Well Ollie (Tea not Craner), I'm not saying that art and (pop)music are identical. I just think that they follow very similar trajectories and ultimately face pretty much the same problems with regard to originality and undergroundness (or authenticity or rebellion or whatever).
It's probably true that art tends to be thought of as more high-brow than pop-music and viewed in a way that is more self-consciously intellectual but that's evident from the start isn't it? If that's your problem with art then I can't argue but I thought you were saying something more than that.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't think you can compare pop music with conceptual art.

Well I was trying to compare modern music generally with modern art generally - probably not very successfully, but hey.

I'd rather say that contemporary art is much more accepted than its equivalent in music, there are certainly a lot more people walking through Tate Modern, Guggenheim, MOMA etc. than attending Wandelweiser performances. Of course, you still hear the occasional 'my three year old daughter could do that' with modern art, but in general this stuff is a big, fully established segment of the art world. But if you look at most music programming, even the usual new music heavyweights (Stockhausen, Cage etc.) don't appear that often.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I was getting at. Basically, stuff that's conceptual, transgressive or otherwise highly challenging is far more mainstream in modern art than in modern music.

On the point about what constitutes 'transgressive' or 'shocking': yes, Elvis outraged white Middle America but that was because his music and performances were explicitly sexual (and implicitly black, of course) in a very repressed, conservative era; the Sex Pistols upset people because they had songs about anarchy and abortions and spat at their fans and said "fuck" on television. So really those are quite specific ideological reasons why they offended people. They still sang and played instruments, which is how people have made music since the beginning of time. They weren't immersing microphones into pans of boiling water or back-masking recordings of their farts or whatever would be equivalent to modern conceptual art. It was the content rather than the form of the music that shocked. With modern art it's often the form itself.

Also, it seems hard to imagine how performances could possibly be any more transgressive than some of the stuff COUM Transmissions/TG were getting up to in the '70s, or Einsturzende Neubauten's infamous ICA gig in which they made a spirited attempt at destroying the venue as part of the performance. I think an artist tried to recreate that gig a couple of years ago but of course had to tone down a lot of actual destruction. But this kind of stuff is more performance art than it is music, or at least lies on the boundary.

Sex is the big thing that still shocks of course but for how much longer? A lot of videos on MTV are not far off being porn (oh god, now I sound like someone's dad), so while parents and religious people might not like it, it's pretty mainstream in terms of commercial acceptance. In fact it's completely commercial, if you want something to sell you put some T&A in it, don't you?
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
To talk about Hirst et al as barometers of an art world is like talking about the X Factor as a barometer of the music world - it's true, but, please.

Sure, wasn't trying imply that billionaire YBAs are all there is to contemporary art, though they do seem to represent the logical end point for a certain kind of art.

Art is still shocking and provocative

Yes, it can be, but it's shocking and provocative because it antagonizes a certain regime, isn't it? It's not really that shocking outside of the context of the country and culture it was produced in. In terms of its form, it's still singing and painting. Whereas Duchamp shocked people by suggesting that an upside-down urinal could be considered 'art', and that was nearly 100 years ago. And even before that, people were shocked by impressionism, whereas these days Monet and Degas is the kind of stuff that might adorn place-mats at your gran's house.
 
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blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
Tangentially, I know business-speak has been discussed here off and on... "Blue sky thinking" and all that... but art-speak seems to me to be way more nebulous and Orwellian.

mistersloane is a meta-master of it rather than a victim, but I have one other artist friend who (how to put it?) hasn't been so lucky. I popped into White Cube in HK and had an eye-opening discussion with the staff, in the respect that they all sounded precisely like him. I wish I could spin out examples with the adeptness they demonstrated. I could try perhaps when I'm less tired (just spent the night assembling a couple of hundred CD sets). Essentially the gift is cloaking rather mundane observations in complex-sounding, mostly referential vocabulary.

Does anyone have the dimmest recognition of what I'm talking about?
 

Leo

Well-known member
ha...yeah, i've experienced that. it's weird, i seem to accept complex art-speak more when it's in print rather than when spoken. people who blab that stuff risk sounding very pretentious.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Tangentially, I know business-speak has been discussed here off and on... "Blue sky thinking" and all that... but art-speak seems to me to be way more nebulous and Orwellian.

mistersloane is a meta-master of it rather than a victim, but I have one other artist friend who (how to put it?) hasn't been so lucky. I popped into White Cube in HK and had an eye-opening discussion with the staff, in the respect that they all sounded precisely like him. I wish I could spin out examples with the adeptness they demonstrated. I could try perhaps when I'm less tired (just spent the night assembling a couple of hundred CD sets). Essentially the gift is cloaking rather mundane observations in complex-sounding, mostly referential vocabulary.

Does anyone have the dimmest recognition of what I'm talking about?

I've just read the handout for Hannah Sawtell's piece at the Bloomberg Gallery on Finsury Square so, yes. I still liked the piece though- I think it collapses a lot of the divisions between conceptual art and visual beauty discussed in this thread, and says something interesting about late capitialism but BY GOD the blurb is tedious.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Tangentially, I know business-speak has been discussed here off and on... "Blue sky thinking" and all that... but art-speak seems to me to be way more nebulous and Orwellian.

mistersloane is a meta-master of it rather than a victim, but I have one other artist friend who (how to put it?) hasn't been so lucky. I popped into White Cube in HK and had an eye-opening discussion with the staff, in the respect that they all sounded precisely like him. I wish I could spin out examples with the adeptness they demonstrated. I could try perhaps when I'm less tired (just spent the night assembling a couple of hundred CD sets). Essentially the gift is cloaking rather mundane observations in complex-sounding, mostly referential vocabulary.

Does anyone have the dimmest recognition of what I'm talking about?

I think you might be talking about this :

Marvellous Negative Capabilities :

 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
there's no there there any more...The old order is pretty dead by now

but the old order never really died so much as it just conceded appearances, a concession which actually strengthened it given the vast amounts of energy diverted into pop culture (and the inevitability of recuperation). also there's still a there, it's just that the bulk of the physical manifestation of there - i.e. where things are actually made - has been moved so that the middle-class consumers who power the engine can't see it (which is now being repeated down the line in, for example, the Chinese textile industry outsourcing low-end production to SE Asia or Bangladesh). granted those consumers are the same people who (have the resources to) produce a majority of art so that POV is over-represented.
 
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