The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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antique lab coat, assortment of antique medical and pseudo-scientific medical
devices, pencil.
Figure 3. Detail ofThe Human Genome Projection. Photograph by John W. Sisson
Performance and Authorship
Ideas are thus key to conceptual art. It is the concept that one is supposed to
encounter, that one is meant to take up as the point of the work. In some cases,
the object itself can seem superfluous (hence, the number of works of
conceptual art that exist as mere instructions on how to create something rather
than presentations of the actual thing). Actually doing something or making
something physical is not the ultimate goal of most conceptual art, but rather it
is having an intellectual realization itself that becomes an aesthetic experience.3
Since most conceptual art is deeply dependent on a text or a
background story to explain it, there are many questions that get raised as to
how the meaning of conceptual art is founded. In the past, twentieth-century
aestheticians often claimed that the author’s intent is not important to the
meaning of a traditional work of art. Once the painting or sculpture or
installation, etc. exists, it is a communal object and thus finds its meaning in the
varied experiences of the community, their interpretations, and the
intersubjective meaning they bring to the experience. We cannot, that is, know
what “Waiting for Godot” really means by asking Beckett, and we cannot leam
what the blue Old Guitarist really means by asking Picasso. The author, it is
said, has no privileged position from which to declare some objective, true,
complete, full, real meaning. All of this seems fair. We are not always in full
awareness of our own intentions, and even when we are, those intentions change
in the process of making the art such that to ask the artist what something means