[Bups-dis] Conceptual Art

[Amanda Montgomery]

I’ll mention in reply to Carl’s previous post that writings on the horror film can be an interesting place to explore with negative emotions in art. I thought I’d keep up the aesthetic theme though by posting a few thoughts on intentions and misinterpretation of conceptual art as it’s something that comes up a lot in art-practice but probably not something I’ve explored fully philosophically. 
 	Conceptual art seems to me to be a good illustration of the long-standing philosophical problems regarding the nature of the artwork and how we are to evaluate it, as conceptual pieces can differ very little, if at all, from everyday objects and yet still qualify as art-objects. Aestheticians like Danto have tackled problems like this by placing artworks within their historical context of the ‘artworld’ and showing that the ideas and developments within such pieces have relevance to the contextual ideas of the time and are therefore validated and judged from their position and importance to current art movement. 
 	This is an interesting stance as it removes some of the problems of trying to find eternal art-qualities, such as beauty, expression and so on (since artists in their charming way tend to respond to this by creating ugly works or trying to void them of expression). However there are difficulties with this theory, such the question of whether it merely replaces old-fashioned ‘art-qualities’ with the quality of avant-gardism (an idea that groups like the Stuckists seem to fight against). It also seems to require specifically knowledgeable evaluators of art to determine authenticity and value within current art-historical trends. But to pick up on the issue of evaluation, how well can this authentification to be applied to, for example, conceptual art? In conceptual art the idea of the artwork is seen to be of more importance than the art object itself, yet if this is the case then does it matter if the conceptual outcomes are those that the artist intends? If so then the artwork has to be valued more by how the artist places it in an artworld context through their explanation of their conceptual intentions, and if not an artist would be able to unintentionally create a fine art-historical piece merely through the misinterpretation of it’s intentions. 
 	So, if an artist intends both the creation of an artwork and the communication of, say, idea X, and yet makes the artwork ambiguous enough for the object to inspire idea Y through the act of interpretation on the part of a viewer, then if idea Y is of more relative value than idea X, why should the artwork not be judged on the merits of this concept it has created? When it comes to the importance of authentic intentionality then is it not enough to say that an artwork was intended as the inspirer of a conceptual outcome and that if either the public or the art evaluating elite interpret or misinterpret it in it’s current context, then this is where the value judgement lies? After all, artists may create works of ambiguity rather than direct communication in order to facilitate and encourage such multiple (mis-) interpretations. But if this is not the case and intentionality truly is an over-riding factor, then can two artists place the same object in a gallery, and be judged solely on who creates the better explanation of it afterwards? Surely then the objects are not only of less importance than the concept, but are of no importance at all.
 	A lot of idea-based pieces I’ve first experienced and then discussed with artists later show the massive disparity between intention and outcomes, sometimes with no connection between a very interesting interpretation and it’s very different origin (which feels horrible if you’ve just been having life-changing thoughts over a piece that someone just made because they liked the colours) and sometimes with virtually no conscious intention on the part of the artist at all. It seems hard to say that even superior critics could spot this difference at its most subtle, if the object itself has so little bearing on outcomes. I used to think of this through the idea of an artist who is heralded as brilliant by critics, develops an ongoing style that is seen as innovative but relevant to the current artworld, only to turn around after twenty years of silence and say that he didn’t understand any of this attention his pieces had been giving, he had just, say, been splashing paint on a canvas for the hell of it and was doing so with very little knowledge of the art-scene of his time.
 	Perhaps this is actually a problem with the nature of conceptual art, where an object is given art-status based on the quality of the ideas it contains, while these actually lie with artist and viewer and their communication through the object is both ambiguous and multi-interpretable (leading into the labyrinth of New Criticism…). Or perhaps Danto’s theory is simply not quite the solution it seems to be. Intentionality and misinterpretation draw in a lot of issues about the nature of art-experience (of both artist and viewer) and what qualifies the art-object but it’d be interesting to hear what people think on the matter,

Amanda