#04.09.2022 If you don’t understand conceptual art, it is really not your fault!
In 1969, BS Johnson published the experimental book « The Unfortunates”, in a box, with no binders, so that the reader could assemble it however he wanted to.
27 chapters, out of which the first and the last chapter are specified. The rest of 25 are left to the reader to experience it in his own way, giving a total of 15.5 septillion possible combinations that the story can be read in ( as Wikipedia says).
Kind of metaphoric, isn’t it? I want to see the book like that… birth and death are certainties, but what happens in between, are 15,5 septillion possible combinations of things to happen.
Is the book about that? I don’t know, I haven’t read it.
An everyday object could be art by the choice of the artist, considered Marcel Duchamp when introducing the "Readymades" - art for the mind not for the eyes. The beginning of conceptual art…
But what is conceptual art?
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.
Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’,
I loved the initial idea of conceptual art - a manifesto against the highly commercialized art world (typically, temporary creations so that they cannot be collected). Nowadays, conceptual art is highly commercialized and requires heavy storytelling, so that you can understand the concept. This is where it took a wrong turn for me.
Isaac Kaplan wrote an informative article about this- If you don’t understand conceptual art, it is not your fault.
A bad conceptual work makes you feel that the idea isn’t worth finding. A good one spurs you to keep searching. Why did Maurizio Cattelan hang every work of art he’s ever created from the ceiling of the Guggenheim?
If there is something worth remembering from this short email, it’s exactly this -if you don’t understand conceptual art, remember what Isaac Kaplan said: it is not your fault.