Conceptual art, sometimes called idea art, is art in which the ideas embodied by a piece are more central to the work than the means used to create it. It was described by the artist Sol LeWitt like so:
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. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Conceptual art as a movement emerged during the mid-1960s, in part as a reaction against formalism as it was then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg. However, the work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp from the 1910s and 1920s paved the way for the Conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically Conceptual works (the readymades, for instance) that defied categorisation and could not be said to be art by virtue of their specific visual properties alone.
Conceptual art often makes use of materials such as photographs, maps, and written texts. It is sometimes (as in the work of Lawrence Weiner) reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, but stopping short of actually making it--emphasising that the idea is more important than the artefact. Some conceptual artists were also attempting to avoid the commodification of art, by refusing to produce luxury objects of the type traditionally housed in museums.
The Conceptual Art movement extended from approximately 1967 through 1978. It has proven very influential on subsequent artists, and well known contemporary artists such as Mike Kelley or Tracy Emin are sometimes labeled "second- or third-generation" conceptualists, or "post-conceptual" artists.
Conceptualartists believe that by making the idea the art, they have escaped the bonds of the art object, they have bypassed the skill necessary to make the art object, and they have superseded all the other "base machinations" that have historically been associated with art.
The "conceptual"artist is a little 12-year-old kid mumbling into a paper cup, all the while imagining that he is practicing some sort of radical new form of telepathic communication.
No, the difference between a conceptualartist and a lunatic is that the former is in dialogue with a curator, and the latter is in dialogue with the voices that won't leave him alone.
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