Editing Conceptual art (section)

==The critique of formalism and of the commodification of art==
Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s – in part as a reaction against [[Formalism (art)|formalism]] as then articulated by the influential [[New York City|New York]] [[art critic]] [[Clement Greenberg]]. According to Greenberg [[Modern art]] followed a process of progressive reduction and refinement toward the goal of defining the essential, [[formalism (art)|formal]] nature of each medium. Those elements that ran counter to this nature were to be reduced. The task of painting, for example, was to define precisely what kind of object a painting truly is: what makes it a painting and nothing else. As it is of the nature of paintings to be flat objects with canvas surfaces onto which colored pigment is applied, such things as [[figurative art|figuration]], 3-D [[Perspective (graphical)|perspective]] illusion and references to external subject matter were all found to be extraneous to the essence of painting, and ought to be removed.<ref>Rorimer, p. 11</ref>

Some have argued that conceptual art continued this "dematerialization" of art by removing the need for objects altogether,<ref>
Lucy Lippard & John Chandler, "The Dematerialization of Art", ''Art International'' 12:2, February 1968. Reprinted in Osborne (2002), p. 218
</ref>
while others, including many of the artists themselves, saw conceptual art as a radical break with Greenberg's kind of formalist Modernism. Later artists continued to share a preference for art to be self-critical, as well as a distaste for illusion. However, by the end of the 1960s it was certainly clear that Greenberg's stipulations for art to continue within the confines of each medium and to exclude external subject matter no longer held traction.<ref>Rorimer, p. 12</ref>
Conceptual art also reacted against the [[commodification]] of art; it attempted a subversion of the gallery or museum as the location and determiner of art, and the art market as the owner and distributor of art. [[Lawrence Weiner]] said: "Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it." Many conceptual artists' work can therefore only be known about through documentation which is manifested by it, e.g., photographs, written texts or displayed objects, which some might argue are not in and of themselves the art. It is sometimes (as in the work of [[Robert Barry (artist)|Robert Barry]], [[Yoko Ono]], and Weiner himself) reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, but stopping short of actually making it—emphasising the idea as more important than the artifact. This reveals an explicit preference for the "art" side of the ostensible dichotomy between art and [[craft]], where art, unlike craft, takes place within and engages historical discourse: for example, Ono's "written instructions" make more sense alongside other conceptual art of the time.

[[Image:WeinerText.JPG|thumb|260px|[[Lawrence Weiner]]. ''Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole,'' The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2005.]]
[[Image:An Oak Tree (conceptual art installation).jpg|thumb|260px|''[[An Oak Tree]]'' by [[Michael Craig-Martin]]. 1973]]
[[Image:Memorial for the Victims of Nazi Military Justice by Olaf Nicolai 02.jpg|thumb|260px|upright=1.2|Detail, ''[[Memorial for the Victims of Nazi Military Justice]]'' by monumental sculptor [[Olaf Nicolai]], [[Ballhausplatz]], Vienna]]