Conceptual art is art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 in which the concept

Concept

The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...

(s) or idea

Idea

In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...

(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations

Installation art

Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...

, of the artist Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt

Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....

 may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:
Tony Godfrey, author of Conceptual Art (Art & Ideas) (1998), asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art, a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, "Art after Philosophy" (1969). The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of (the influential art critic) Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...

's vision of Modern art during the 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...

, Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...

 and the English Art & Language

Art & Language

Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...

 group began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible (see below). One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects.

Through its association with the Young British Artists

Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...

 and the Turner Prize

Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

 during the 1990s, in popular usage, particularly in the UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, "conceptual art" came to denote all contemporary art

Contemporary art

Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...

 that does not practice the traditional skills of painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 and sculpture

Sculpture

Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...

. It could be said that one of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself. As the artist Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Mr. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University...

 suggested as early as 1970, in explaining why he does not like the epithet "conceptual", it is not always entirely clear what "concept" refers to, and it runs the risk of being confused with "intention." Thus, in describing or defining a work of art

Work of art

A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...

 as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as "conceptual" with an artist's "intention."

History

The French artist Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

 paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptual works — the readymades, for instance. The most famous of Duchamp's readymades was Fountain

Fountain (Duchamp)

Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...

(1917), a standard urinal basin signed by the artist with the pseudonym "R.Mutt", and submitted for inclusion in the annual, un-juried exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York (it was rejected). In traditional terms, a commonplace object such as a urinal cannot be said to be art because it is not made by an artist or with any intention of being art, nor is it unique or hand-crafted. Duchamp's relevance and theoretical importance for future "conceptualists" was later acknowledged by US artist Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...

 in his 1969 essay, "Art after Philosophy," when he wrote: "All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually."

In 1956, recalling the infinitesimals of G.W. Leibniz, quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually, the founder of Lettrism

Lettrism

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...

, Isidore Isou

Isidore Isou

Isidore Isou , born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist...

, developed the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually. Also called Art esthapériste ('infinite-aesthetics'). Related to this, and arising out of it, is excoördism, the current incarnation of the Isouian movement, defined as the art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

In 1961 the term "concept art," coined by the artist Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...

 in his article bearing the term as its title, appeared in a Fluxus

Fluxus

Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

 publication. However it assumed a different meaning when employed by Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...

 and the English Art and Language group, who discarded the conventional art object in favour of a documented critical inquiry into the artist's social, philosophical and psychological status. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indexes, performances, texts and paintings to this end. In 1970 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, the first dedicated conceptual art exhibition, was mounted at the New York Cultural Center.

The Critique of Formalism and the Commodification of Art

Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s. In part, it was a reaction against formalism

Formalism (art)

In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...

 as it was then articulated by the influential New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 art critic

Art critic

An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

 Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...

. According to Greenberg Modern art

Modern art

Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

 followed a process of progressive reduction and refinement toward the goal of defining the essential, formal

Formalism (art)

In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...

 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 figuration, 3-D perspective

Perspective (graphical)

Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...

 illusion and references to external subject matter were all found to be extraneous to the essence of painting, and ought to be removed.

Some have argued that conceptual art continued this "dematerialization" of art by removing the need for objects altogether, 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.

Conceptual art also reacted against the commodification

Commodification

Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....

 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

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...

 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 themselves the art. It is sometimes (as in the work of Robert Barry

Robert Barry (artist)

Robert Barry is an American artist. Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media...

, Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono

is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

, and Weiner himself) 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 artifact.

Language and/as art

Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. Although the appearance of text in art was by no means novel, it was not until the 1960s that the artists Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...

, Edward Ruscha

Edward Ruscha

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California...

, Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...

, Robert Barry

Robert Barry (artist)

Robert Barry is an American artist. Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media...

, and the English Art & Language

Art & Language

Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...

 group began to produce art by exclusively linguistic means. Where previously language was presented as one kind of visual element alongside others, and subordinate to an overarching composition

Composition (visual arts)

In the visual arts – in particular painting, graphic design, photography and sculpture – composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art or a photograph, as distinct from the subject of a work...

 (see for example Synthetic Cubism), the conceptual artists used language in place of brush and canvas, and allowed it to signify in its own right. Of Lawrence Weiner's works Anne Rorimer writes, "The thematic content of individual works derives solely from the import of the language employed, while presentational means and contextual placement play crucial, yet separate, roles."

The British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art Peter Osborne

Peter Osborne (writer and academic)

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Kingston University, London...

 suggests that among the many factors that influenced the gravitation toward language-based art, of vital importance for conceptualism was the turn to linguistic theories of meaning in both Anglo-American analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...

, and structuralist

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

 and post structuralist

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...

 Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

 during the middle of the twentieth century. This linguistic turn

Linguistic turn

The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language....

 "reinforced and legitimized" the direction the conceptual artists took. Osborne also notes that the early conceptualists were the first generation of artists to complete degree-based university training in art.

Conceptual Art and Artistic Skill

"By adopting language as their exclusive medium, Weiner, Barry, Wilson, Kosuth and Art & Language were able to sweep aside the vestiges of authorial presence manifested by formal invention and the handling of materials."

An important difference between conceptual art and more "traditional" forms of art-making goes to the question of artistic skill. Although it is often the case that skill in the handling of traditional media plays little role in conceptual art, it is difficult to argue that no skill is required to make conceptual works, or that skill is always absent from them. John Baldessari

John Baldessari

John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...

, for instance, has presented realist pictures that he commissioned professional sign-writers to paint; and many conceptual performance artists (e.g. Stelarc

Stelarc

Stelarc is a Cypriot-Australian performance artist whose works focuses heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centred around his concept that the human body is obsolete...

, Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...

) are technically accomplished performers and skilled manipulators of their own bodies. It is thus not so much an absence of skill or hostility toward tradition that defines conceptual art as an evident disregard for conventional, modern notions of authorial presence and individual artistic expression (or genius).

Contemporary Influence

The first wave of the "conceptual art" movement extended from approximately 1967 to 1978. Early "concept" artists like Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt

Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...

, Robert Morris

Robert Morris (artist)

Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...

, and Ray Johnson

Ray Johnson

Raymond Edward Johnson , known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art...

 influenced the later, widely accepted movement of conceptual art. Conceptual artists like Dan Graham

Dan Graham

Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....

, Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...

, and Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...

 have proven very influential on subsequent artists, and well known contemporary artists such as Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley is a contemporary American artist. Kelley's work involves found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He often works collaboratively and has done projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and John Miller...

 or Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....

 are sometimes labeled "second- or third-generation" conceptualists, or "post-conceptual" artists.

Many of the concerns of the conceptual art movement have been taken up by contemporary artists. While they may or may not term themselves "conceptual artists", ideas such as anti-commodification, social and/or political critique, and ideas/information as medium continue to be aspects of contemporary art, especially among artists working with installation art

Installation art

Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...

, performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

, net.art

Net.art

"net.art" refers to a group of artists who worked in the medium of Internet art from 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting...

 and electronic

Electronic art

Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media or, more broadly, refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music...

/digital art

Digital art

Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...

.

Controversy in the UK

In Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, the rise to prominence of the Young British Artists

Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...

 (YBAs) after the 1988 Freeze

Freeze (exhibition)

Freeze is the title of an art exhibition that took place in July 1988 in an empty London Port Authority building at Surrey Docks in London Docklands. Its main organiser was Damien Hirst. It was significant in the subsequent development of the Young British Artists.-Organisation:Freeze was...

show, curated by Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...

, and subsequent promotion of the group by the Saatchi Gallery

Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to exhibit his collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and...

 during the 1990s, generated a media backlash, where the phrase "conceptual art" came to be a term of derision applied to much contemporary art

Contemporary art

Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...

. This was amplified by the Turner Prize

Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

 whose more extreme nominees (most notably Hirst and Emin) caused a controversy annually.

The Stuckist

Stuckism

Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...

 group of artists, founded in 1999, proclaimed themselves "pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts." They also called it pretentious, "unremarkable and boring" and on July 25, 2002 deposited a coffin outside the White Cube

White Cube

White Cube is a contemporary art gallery designed by MRJ Rundell & Associates in Hoxton Square in the East End of London Mason's Yard, in central London and White Cube Bermondsey in South East London...

 gallery, marked "The Death of Conceptual Art". They staged yearly demonstrations

Stuckist demonstrations

Stuckist demonstrations since 2000 have been a key part of the Stuckist art group's activities and have succeeded in giving them a high profile both in Britain and abroad...

 outside the Turner Prize

Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

.

In 2002, Ivan Massow

Ivan Massow

Ivan Massow is a British entrepreneur and financial adviser. He founded PayMeMy.com in September 2011; a service which pays back 'trail' commissions - often thousands of pounds a year - to policy-holders themselves, instead of the IFAs who originally set the policies up.Ivan was also Chairman of...

, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts

Institute of Contemporary Arts

The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...

 branded conceptual art "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" and in "danger of disappearing up its own arse ... led by cultural tsars such as the Tate

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

's Sir Nicholas Serota

Nicholas Serota

Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota is a British art curator. Serota was director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, before becoming director of the Tate, the United Kingdom's national gallery of modern and British art in 1988. He was awarded a knighthood in 1999. He...

." Massow was consequently forced to resign. At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells

Kim Howells

Kim Scott Howells is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Pontypridd from 1989 to 2010, and held a number of ministerial positions within the Government.-Biography:...

 (an art school graduate) denounced the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".

In October 2004 the Saatchi Gallery

Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to exhibit his collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and...

 told the media that "painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate."

Notable examples of conceptual art

• 1953 : Robert Rauschenberg
  Robert Rauschenberg
  Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
  
   exhibits Erased De Kooning Drawing, a drawing by Willem De Kooning
  Willem de Kooning
  Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
  
   which Rauschenberg erased. It raised many questions about the fundamental nature of art, challenging the viewer to consider whether erasing another artist's work could be a creative act, as well as whether the work was only "art" because the famous Rauschenberg had done it.

• 1956 : Isidore Isou
  Isidore Isou
  Isidore Isou , born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist...
  
   introduces the concept of infinitesimal art in Introduction à une esthétique imaginaire (Introduction to Imaginary Aesthetics).

• 1957: Yves Klein
  Yves Klein
  Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
  
  , Aerostatic Sculpture (Paris). This was composed of 1001 blue balloons released into the sky from Galerie Iris Clert
  Galerie Iris Clert
  The Iris Clert Gallery was an art gallery named after its Greek owner and curator, Iris Clert. The single-room gallery was located on 3 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France...
  
   to promote his Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch exhibition. Klein also exhibited 'One Minute Fire Painting' which was a blue panel into which 16 firecrackers were set. For his next major exhibition, The Void in 1958, Klein declared that his paintings were now invisible and to prove it he exhibited an empty room.

• 1960: Yves Klein
  Yves Klein
  Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
  
  's action called A Leap Into The Void, in which he attempts to fly by leaping out of a window. He stated: "The painter has only to create one masterpiece, himself, constantly."

• 1960: The artist Stanley Brouwn declares that all the shoe shops in Amsterdam constitute an exhibition of his work.

• 1961: Robert Rauschenberg
  Robert Rauschenberg
  Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
  
   sent a telegram to the Galerie Iris Clert
  Galerie Iris Clert
  The Iris Clert Gallery was an art gallery named after its Greek owner and curator, Iris Clert. The single-room gallery was located on 3 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France...
  
   which said: 'This is a portrait of Iris Clert
  Iris Clert
  Iris Clert was the owner of the Galerie Iris Clert from 1955 to 1971. During its tenure, her gallery became an avant-garde hotspot in the international art scene, particularly to Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely and Arman....
  
   if I say so.' as his contribution to an exhibition of portraits.

• 1961: Piero Manzoni
  Piero Manzoni
  Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...
  
   exhibited Artist's shit
  Artist's shit
  Artist's Shit is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each 30 grams and measuring 4.8x6.5cm, with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating: Artist's Shit...
  
  , tins purportedly containing his own feces
  Feces
  Feces, faeces, or fæces is a waste product from an animal's digestive tract expelled through the anus or cloaca during defecation.-Etymology:...
  
   (although since the work would be destroyed if opened, no-one has been able to say for sure). He put the tins on sale for their own weight in gold. He also sold his own breath (enclosed in balloons) as Bodies of Air
  Corpo d'aria
  "Corpo d'aria" is an artist’s multiple by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. Manufactured between October 1959 and March 1960, the pieces comprise of a box, a tripod base, deflated balloon and a mouthpiece. 45 copies were made and sold at 30,000 lire each...
  
  , and signed people's bodies, thus declaring them to be living works of art either for all time or for specified periods. (This depended on how much they are prepared to pay). Marcel Broodthaers
  Marcel Broodthaers
  Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works....
  
   and Primo Levi
  Primo Levi
  Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...
  
   are amongst the designated 'artworks'.

• 1962: Christo
  Christo and Jeanne-Claude
  Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple who created environmental works of art...
  
  's Iron Curtain work. This consists of a barricade of oil barrels in a narrow Paris street which caused a large traffic jam. The artwork was not the barricade itself but the resulting traffic jam.

• 1962: Yves Klein
  Yves Klein
  Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
  
   presents Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity
  Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle
  Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle is an artist's book and performance by the French artist Yves Klein...
  
  in various ceremonies on the banks of the Seine. He offers to sell his own 'pictorial sensitivity' (whatever that was, he did not define it) in exchange for gold leaf. In these ceremonies the purchaser gave Klein the gold leaf in return for a certificate. Since Klein's sensitivity was immaterial, the purchaser was then required to burn the certificate whilst Klein threw half the gold leaf into the Seine. (There were seven purchasers.)

• 1962: Piero Manzoni
  Piero Manzoni
  Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...
  
   created The Base of the World, thereby exhibiting the entire planet as his artwork.

• 1963: George Brecht's
  George Brecht
  George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
  
   collection of Event-Scores, Water Yam
  Water Yam (artist's multiple)
  Water Yam is an artist's book by the American artist George Brecht. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, it has been re-published in various countries several times since...
  
  , is published as the first Fluxkit by George Maciunas
  George Maciunas
  George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
  
  .

• 1963: Henry Flynt
  Henry Flynt
  Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
  
  s article Concept Art is published in "An Anthology of Chance Operations"; a collection of artworks and concepts by artists and musicians that was published by Jackson Mac Low
  Jackson Mac Low
  Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
  
   and La Monte Young
  La Monte Young
  La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
  
   (ed.). "An Anthology of Chance Operations" documented the development of Dick Higgins
  Dick Higgins
  Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
  
   vision of intermedia
  Intermedia
  Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
  
   art in the context of the ideas of John Cage
  John Cage
  John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
  
   and became an early Fluxus
  Fluxus
  Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
  
   masterpiece. Flynt's "concept art" devolved from his idea of "cognitive nihilism" and from his insights about the vulnerabilities of logic and mathematics.

• 1964: Yoko Ono
  Yoko Ono
  is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
  
   publishes Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings
  Grapefruit (book)
  Grapefruit is an artist's book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. It has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of "event scores" that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an...
  
  . An example of Heuristic art, or a series of instructions for how to obtain an aesthetic experience.

• 1965: A complex conceptual art piece by John Latham
  John Latham (artist)
  John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a British conceptual artist who lived for many years in England. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences...
  
   called Still and Chew. He invites art students to protest against the values of Clement Greenberg
  Clement Greenberg
  Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
  
  's Art and Culture (much praised and taught in London's St. Martin's School of Art
  Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
  Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. The school has an outstanding international reputation, and is considered one of the world's leading art and design institutions...
  
   where Latham taught). Pages of Greenberg's book (borrowed from the college library) are chewed by the students, dissolved in acid and the resulting solution returned to the library bottled and labelled. Latham was then fired from his part-time position.

• 1965: with Show V, immaterial sculpture the Dutch artist Marinus Boezem
  Marinus Boezem
  Marinus Lambertus van den Boezem is a Dutch artist.He is known for his radical view of art and his works in public space. Together with Wim T...
  
   introduced Conceptual Art in the Netherlands. In the show various air doors are placed where people can walk through them. People have the sensory experience of warmth, air.Three invisble air doors, which arise as currents of cold and warm are blown into the room, are indicated in the space with bundles of arrows and lines. The articulation of the space which arises is the result of invisible processes which influence the conduct of persons in that space, and who are included in the system as co-performers.

• Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
  
   dates the concept of One and Three Chairs
  One and Three Chairs
  One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a work by Joseph Kosuth. An example of conceptual art, the piece consists of a chair, a photograph of this chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair"...
  
   in the year 1965. The presentation of the work consists of a chair, its photo and a blow up of a definition of the word "chair". Kosuth has chosen the definition from a dictionary. Four versions with different definitions are known.

• 1966: N.E. Thing Co.
  N.E. Thing Co.
  N.E. Thing Co. was a Canadian art collective producing work from 1967-1978. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, N.E. Thing Co. was run by co-presidents Iain and Ingrid Baxter....
  
   Ltd. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter of Vancouver) exhibited Bagged Place the contents of a four room apartment wrapped in plastic bags. The same year they registered as a corporation and subsequently organized their practice along corporate models, one of the first international examples of the "aesthetic of administration."

• 1967: Sol LeWitt
  Sol LeWitt
  Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
  
  ´s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art were published by the American art journal Artforum
  Artforum
  Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
  
  . The Paragraphs mark the progression from Minimal to Conceptual Art.

• 1968: Lawrence Weiner
  Lawrence Weiner
  Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...
  
   relenquishes the physical making of his work and formulates his "Declaration of Intent," one of the most important conceptual art statements following LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art." The declaration, which underscores his subsequent practice reads: "1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership."

• Friedrich Heubach launches the magazine Interfunktionen in Cologne, Germany, a publication that excelled in artists' projects. It originally showed a Fluxus influence, but later moved toward Conceptual art.

• 1969: Robert Barry
  Robert Barry (artist)
  Robert Barry is an American artist. Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media...
  
  's Telepathic Piece at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, of which he said 'During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image'.

• The first issue of "Art-Language" is published in May. It is subtitled as "The Journal of conceptual art" and edited by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell. The editors are English members of the artists group Art & Language
  Art & Language
  Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
  
  .

• 1969: Vito Acconci
  Vito Acconci
  Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
  
   creates "Following Piece," in which he follows randomly selected members of the public until they disappear into a private space. The piece is presented as photographs.

• The English journal "Studio International" published Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
  
  ´s article "Art after Philosophy" in three parts (October–December). It became the most discussed article on "Conceptual Art".

• 1970: Painter John Baldessari
  John Baldessari
  John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
  
   exhibits a film in which he sets a series of erudite statements by Sol LeWitt on the subject of conceptual art to popular tunes like 'Camptown Races' and 'Some Enchanted Evening'.

• 1970: Douglas Huebler
  Douglas Huebler
  Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist.-Life and career:Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II...
  
   exhibits a series of photographs which were taken every two minutes whilst driving along a road for 24 minutes.

• 1970: Douglas Huebler
  Douglas Huebler
  Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist.-Life and career:Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II...
  
   asks museum visitors to write down 'one authentic secret'. The resulting 1800 documents are compiled into a book which, by some accounts, makes for very repetitive reading as most secrets are similar.

• 1971: Hans Haacke
  Hans Haacke
  Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...
  
  's 'Real Time Social System'. This piece of systems art
  Systems art
  Systems art is art influenced by cybernetics, and systems theory, which reflects on natural systems, social systems and social signs of the art world itself....
  
   detailed the real estate holdings of the third largest landowners in New York City. The properties were mostly in Harlem and the Lower East Side
  Lower East Side
  The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
  
  , were decrepit and poorly maintained, and represented the largest concentration of real estate in those areas under the control of a single group. The captions gave various financial details about the buildings, including recent sales between companies owned or controlled by the same family. The Guggenheim museum cancelled the exhibition, stating that the overt political implications of the work constituted "an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism". There is no evidence to suggest that the trustees of the Guggenheim were linked financially to the family which was the subject of the work.

• 1972: Fred Forest
  Fred Forest
  Fred Forest is a French new media artist making use of video, photography, the printed press, mail, radio, television, telephone, telematics, and the internet in a wide range of installations, performances, and public interventions that explore both the ramifications and potential of media space...
  
   buys an area of blank space in the newspaper Le Monde and invites readers to fill it with their own works of art.

• General Idea
  General Idea
  General Idea was a collective of three Canadian artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, who were active from 1967 to 1994.As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on...
  
   launch File magazine in Toronto. The magazine functioned as something of an extended, collaborative artwork.

• 1974: Cadillac Ranch
  Cadillac Ranch
  Cadillac Ranch is a public art installation and sculpture in Amarillo, Texas, U.S. It was created in 1974 by Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels, who were a part of the art group Ant Farm, and it consists of what were either older running used or junk Cadillac automobiles, representing a...
  
   near Amarillo, Texas.

• 1975-76: Three issues of the journal "The Fox" were published in New York. The editor was Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
  
  . "The Fox" became an important platform for the American members of Art & Language
  Art & Language
  Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
  
  . Karl Beveridge, Ian Burn, Sarah Charlesworth
  Sarah Charlesworth
  Sarah Charlesworth is a well-known American conceptual artist and photographer. She was born in East Orange, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1969 and now lives in New York City...
  
  , Michael Corris
  Michael Corris
  Michael Corris is an artist, art historian and writer on art. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Previously, Corris held the post of Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Center,...
  
  , Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
  
  , Andrew Menard, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith wrote articles which thematized the context of contemporary art. These articles exemplify the development of an institutional critique within the inner circle of Conceptual Art. The criticism of the art world integrates social, political and economic reasons.

• 1977: Walter De Maria
  Walter De Maria
  -Early life and career:De Maria was born in Albany, California on October 1, 1935. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Although trained as a painter, De Maria soon turned to sculpture and began using other media...
  
  's 'Vertical Earth Kilometer' in Kassel
  Kassel
  Kassel is a town located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Kassel Regierungsbezirk and the Kreis of the same name and has approximately 195,000 inhabitants.- History :...
  
  , Germany. This was a one kilometer brass rod which was sunk into the earth so that nothing remained visible except a few centimeters. Despite its size, therefore, this work exists mostly in the viewer's mind.

• 1977: John Fekner
  John Fekner
  John Fekner is an innovative artist who created hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany in the 70s and 80s...
  
   creates hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany.

• 1989: Christopher Williams
  Christopher Williams (artist)
  Christopher Williams is an American conceptual artist and fine art photographer. He is represented by David Zwirner, New York.-Academic career:Williams graduated from Grinnell College...
  
  ' Angola to Vietnam is first exhibited. The work consists of a series of black-and-white photographs of glass botanical specimens from the Botanical Museum at Harvard University
  Harvard University
  Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
  
  , chosen according to a list of the thirty-six countries in which political disappearances were known to have taken place during the year 1985.

• 1990: Ashley Bickerton
  Ashley Bickerton
  Ashley Bickerton is a contemporary artist living in Bali. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combines both photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages...
  
   and Ronald Jones
  Ronald Jones (Interdisciplinarian)
  Ronald Jones an artist, critic and educator who gained prominence in New York City during the mid-1980s...
  
   included in "Mind Over Matter: Concept and Object" exhibition of ”third generation Conceptual artists” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

• 1991: Ronald Jones
  Ronald Jones (Interdisciplinarian)
  Ronald Jones an artist, critic and educator who gained prominence in New York City during the mid-1980s...
  
   exhibits objects and text, art, history and science rooted in grim political reality at Metro Pictures Gallery
  Metro Pictures Gallery
  METRO PICTURES is a New York City art gallery founded in 1980 by Janelle Reiring, previously of Castelli Gallery, and Helene Winer, previously of Artist's Space...
  
  .

• 1991: Charles Saatchi
  Charles Saatchi
  Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...
  
   funds Damien Hirst and the next year in the Saatchi Gallery
  Saatchi Gallery
  The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to exhibit his collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and...
  
   exhibits his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

• 1992: Maurizio Bolognini
  Maurizio Bolognini
  Maurizio Bolognini is an Italian post-conceptual artist. His installations explore the potential and implications of new media technologies starting from the minimal and abstract activation of processes that are beyond artist's control, at the crossroads between generative art, public art and...
  
   starts to "seal" his Programmed Machines: hundreds of computers are programmed and left to run ad infinitum to generate inexhaustible flows of random images which nobody would see.

• 1993: Matthieu Laurette
  Matthieu Laurette
  Matthieu Laurette is a media and conceptual contemporary French artist who works in a variety of media, from TV and video to installation and public interventions....
  
   established his artistic birth certificate by taking part in a French TV game called 'Tournez manège' (The Dating Game) where the female presenter asked him who he was, to which he replied: 'A multimedia artist'. Laurette had sent out invitations to an art audience to view the show on TV from their home, turning his staging of the artist into a performed reality.

• 1993: Vanessa Beecroft
  Vanessa Beecroft
  Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
  
   holds her first performance in Milan, Italy, using models to act as a second audience to the display of her diary of food.

• 1999: Tracey Emin
  Tracey Emin
  Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....
  
   is nominated for the Turner Prize
  Turner Prize
  The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...
  
  . Part of her exhibit is My Bed, her dishevelled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her bedroom slippers.

• 2001: Martin Creed
  Martin Creed
  Martin Creed is an artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, which was an empty room in which the lights went on and off.-Life and work :...
  
   wins the Turner Prize for The Lights Going On and Off, an empty room in which the lights go on and off.

• 2004: Andrea Fraser
  Andrea Fraser
  Andrea Fraser is a New York-based performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of institutional critique. She is currently a member of the Art Department faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.-Position:...
  
  's video Untitled, a document of her sexual encounter in a hotel room with a collector (the collector having agreed to help finance the technical costs for enacting and filming the encounter) is exhibited at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. It is accompanied by her 1993 work Don't Postpone Joy, or Collecting Can Be Fun, a 27-page transcript of an interview with a collector in which the majority of the text has been deleted.

• 2005: Simon Starling
  Simon Starling
  Simon Starling is an English conceptual artist and was the winner of the 2005 Turner Prize. He lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, and is a professor of art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.-Biography:...
  
   wins the Turner Prize for Shedboatshed, a wooden shed which he had turned into a boat, floated down the Rhine and turned back into a shed again.

Notable conceptual artists

• Vito Acconci
  Vito Acconci
  Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
  
  
• Vikky Alexander
  Vikky Alexander
  Vikky Alexander is a Canadian contemporary artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has exhibited internationally since 1981. Working across mediums she is a leading practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism and is well-known as an installation artist who uses photography, drawing,...
  
  
• Art & Language
  Art & Language
  Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
  
  
• Marina Abramović
  Marina Abramovic
  Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...
  
  
• Billy Apple
  Billy Apple
  Billy Apple, ONZM is an artist whose work is associated with the New York and British schools of Pop Art in the 1960s and with the Conceptual Art movement in the 1970s. He collaborated with the likes of Andy Warhol and other pop artists...
  
  
• Shusaku Arakawa
  Shusaku Arakawa
  was a Japanese artist and architect. He had a personal and artistic partnership with writer and artist Madeline Gins that spanned more than four decades.-Life:...
  
  
• Michael Asher
• Mireille Astore
  Mireille Astore
  Mireille Astore is an artist and a writer. She left Beirut during the Lebanese civil war in 1975 to live in Melbourne, Australia. She studied the Sciences at the University of Melbourne where she graduated before becoming a full-time artist and writer...
  
  
• John Baldessari
  John Baldessari
  John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
  
  
• Artur Barrio
  Artur Barrio
  Artur Barrio is an artist who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Much of his work consists of installation pieces that create interaction with the public. Barrio engages the viewer as participant in his art, often without their knowledge that it is art in which they are participating...
  
  
• Robert Barry
  Robert Barry (artist)
  Robert Barry is an American artist. Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media...
  
  
• Lothar Baumgarten
  Lothar Baumgarten
  Lothar Baumgarten is a German conceptual artist, based in New York and Düsseldorf. His work includes installation and film.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Joseph Beuys
  Joseph Beuys
  Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
  
  
• Mel Bochner
  Mel Bochner
  Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Mr. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University...
  
  
• Marinus Boezem
  Marinus Boezem
  Marinus Lambertus van den Boezem is a Dutch artist.He is known for his radical view of art and his works in public space. Together with Wim T...
  
  
• Allan Bridge
  Allan Bridge
  Allan Bridge was an American conceptual artist best known for his creation in 1980 of the confessional phone system known as the Apology Line. He went by the pseudonym Mr...
  
  
• Marcel Broodthaers
  Marcel Broodthaers
  Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works....
  
  
• Chris Burden
  Chris Burden
  Christopher "Chris" Burden is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.-Education:Burden studied for his B.A...
  
  
• Daniel Buren
  Daniel Buren
  Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.- Work :Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.Among his chief concerns is the...
  
  
• Victor Burgin
  Victor Burgin
  Victor Burgin is an artist and a writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film,...
  
  
• John Milton Cage
• Sophie Calle
  Sophie Calle
  Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines...
  
  
• Roberto Chabet
  Roberto Chabet
  -Career:Chabet studied architecture at the University of Santo Tomas where he graduated in 1961. He had his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in the same year. He was the founding museum director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and served there as curator from 1967–1970...
  
  
• Martin Creed
  Martin Creed
  Martin Creed is an artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, which was an empty room in which the lights went on and off.-Life and work :...
  
  
• Jan Dibbets
  Jan Dibbets
  Jan Dibbets , is a Dutch conceptual artist.In 1994, he was commissioned by the Arago Association to create a memorial to the French astronomer François Arago, known as Hommage à Arago...
  
  
• Mark Divo
  Mark Divo
  Mark Divo is a Luxembourgeois conceptual artist and curator who organises large scale interactive art projects incorporating the work of a number of well-known underground artists. His own work involves performance, photography, installation, often using found material.-Career:Between 1988 and...
  
  
• Marcel Duchamp
  Marcel Duchamp
  Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
  
  
• Olafur Eliasson
  Olafur Eliasson
  Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research...
  
  
• John Fekner
  John Fekner
  John Fekner is an innovative artist who created hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany in the 70s and 80s...
  
  
• Henry Flynt
  Henry Flynt
  Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
  
  
• Andrea Fraser
  Andrea Fraser
  Andrea Fraser is a New York-based performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of institutional critique. She is currently a member of the Art Department faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.-Position:...
  
  
• Kendell Geers
  Kendell Geers
  Kendell Geers is an artist, performance artist, musician and film-maker. Geers was born in Johannesburg in 1968.Geers' commonly given birthdate of May 1968 is fictional. Freire Barnes, "", Artist Pension Trust, 4 October 2007. Accessed 15 February 2011. In Venice in 1993, Geers rose to...
  
  
• Thierry Geoffroy
  Thierry Geoffroy
  Thierry Geoffroy , also known as Colonel, is a Danish-French artist. Living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Conceptual artist specialized in format art.-Biography:...
  
  
• Gilbert and George
  Gilbert and George
  Gilbert & George are two artists who work together as a collaborative duo. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have become famous for their distinctive, highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based artworks.-Early life:Gilbert Proesch was...
  
  
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres
  Félix González-Torres
  Felix Gonzalez-Torres was an American, Cuban-born visual artist."For Felix it was much more powerful to assume that the gay and straight audience was the same audience, that being a Cuban-born American is the same as being an American. And being American was something he was extremely proud of."...
  
  
• Allan Graham
  Allan Graham
  Allan Graham, who sometimes uses the name Toadhouse, is a contemporary American artist based in New Mexico...
  
  
• Dan Graham
  Dan Graham
  Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....
  
  
• Hans Haacke
  Hans Haacke
  Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...
  
  
• Iris Häussler
  Iris Häussler
  Iris Häussler is a conceptual- and installation art artist of German origin. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Many of Iris Häussler's works are detailed, hyperrealistic installations that visitors can decode as narrative stories...
  
  
• Oliver Herring
  Oliver Herring
  Oliver Herring is an experimental artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His works include knitting Mylar, participatory performances, styrofoam photo sculptures and video.-Biography:...
  
  
• Jenny Holzer
  Jenny Holzer
  Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist. Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York.-Education:...
  
  
• Greer Honeywill
  Greer Honeywill
  Greer Honeywill is an Australian conceptual artist whose work fuses sculptural conventions, autobiography and critical thinking.-Life and education:...
  
  
• Zhang Huan
  Zhang Huan
  Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York. He made his BA at the He Nan University in Kai Feng and his MA at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing...
  
  
• Douglas Huebler
  Douglas Huebler
  Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist.-Life and career:Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II...
  
  
• General Idea
  General Idea
  General Idea was a collective of three Canadian artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, who were active from 1967 to 1994.As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on...
  
  
• David Ireland
  David Ireland (artist)
  David Kenneth Ireland was an American artist and co-founder of the artist residency.Born in Bellingham, Washington, he studied Printmaking and Industrial Arts at California College of Arts and Crafts, prior to joining the Army in the early 1950s...
  
  
• Ray Johnson
  Ray Johnson
  Raymond Edward Johnson , known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art...
  
  
• Ronald Jones
  Ronald Jones
  Ronald Jones may refer to:* Ronald W. Jones, American professor of economics* Ronald Jones * Ronald Jones * Ronald Jones * Ronald Jones -See also:*Ron Jones...
  
  
• Ilya Kabakov
  Ilya Kabakov
  Ilya Kabakov, Russian Илья́ Ио́сифович Кабако́в , is a Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish descent, born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island...
  
  
• On Kawara
  On Kawara
  is a Japanese conceptual artist living in New York City since 1965. He has shown in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.-Early life:After graduating from Kariya High School in 1951, Kawara moved to Tokyo...
  
  
• Jonathon Keats
  Jonathon Keats
  Jonathon Keats is an American conceptual artist and experimental philosopher known for creating large-scale thought experiments. Keats was born in New York City and studied philosophy at Amherst College...
  
  
• Mary Kelly
  Mary Kelly (artist)
  Mary Kelly is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer. has contributed extensively to the discourse of feminism and postmodernism through her large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings. Kelly’s work mediates between conceptual art and the more intimate...
  
  
• Yves Klein
  Yves Klein
  Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
  
  
• Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
  
  
• Barbara Kruger
  Barbara Kruger
  Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...
  
  
• Yayoi Kusama
  Yayoi Kusama
  is a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation...
  
  
• John Latham
  John Latham (artist)
  John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a British conceptual artist who lived for many years in England. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences...
  
  
• Matthieu Laurette
  Matthieu Laurette
  Matthieu Laurette is a media and conceptual contemporary French artist who works in a variety of media, from TV and video to installation and public interventions....
  
  
• Sol LeWitt
  Sol LeWitt
  Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
  
  
• Richard Long
  Richard Long
  -English political figures:*Richard Long , Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Henry VIII; knighted in 1537; MP for Southwark...
  
  
• Mark Lombardi
  Mark Lombardi
  Mark Lombardi was an American Neo-Conceptualist and an abstract artist who specialized in drawings attempting to document financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general 'the uses and abuses of power'.- Biography :...
  
  
• Piero Manzoni
  Piero Manzoni
  Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...
  
  
• Danny Matthys
  Danny Matthys
  Danny Matthys is a Flemish - Belgian visual artist, which was originally known as conceptual artist of international reputation...
  
  
• Allan McCollum
  Allan McCollum
  Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York City. He has spent over forty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production, focusing most recently on...
  
  
• Cildo Meireles
  Cildo Meireles
  Cildo Meireles is a Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor. He is noted especially for his installations, many of which express resistance to political oppression in Brazil. These works, often large and dense, encourage the viewer's interaction.-Life:Cildo Meireles was born...
  
  
• Marta Minujín
  Marta Minujín
  Marta Minujín is an Argentine Conceptual artist.-Life and work:Marta Minujín was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. She met a young economist, Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini, and married him in secret in 1959; the couple had two children...
  
  
• Linda Montano
  Linda Montano
  Linda Mary Montano is a central figure in contemporary performance art. She was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic household, partly Irish and partly Italian, that was surrounded by artistic activity...
  
  
• N.E. Thing Co.
  N.E. Thing Co.
  N.E. Thing Co. was a Canadian art collective producing work from 1967-1978. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, N.E. Thing Co. was run by co-presidents Iain and Ingrid Baxter....
  
   Ltd. (Iain & Ingrid Baxter)
• Bruce Nauman
  Bruce Nauman
  Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
  
  
• Yoko Ono
  Yoko Ono
  is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
  
  
• Roman Opalka
  Roman Opalka
  Roman Opałka was a French-born Polish painter.Opałka was born on August 27, 1931, in Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, France, to Polish parents. The family returned to Poland in 1946 and Opałka studied lithography at a graphics school before enrolling in the School of Art and Design in Lodz. He later...
  
  
• Dennis Oppenheim
• Adrian Piper
  Adrian Piper
  Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a first-generation conceptual artist and analytic philosopher who was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States...
  
  
• William Pope.L
  William Pope.L
  William Pope.L is an American visual artist best known for his work in performance art, and interventionist public art. However, he has also produced art in painting, photography and theater...
  
  
• Dmitri Prigov
  Dmitri Prigov
  Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov was a Russian writer and artist. Prigov was a dissident during the era of the Soviet Union and was briefly sent to a psychiatric hospital in 1986....
  
  
• Martha Rosler
  Martha Rosler
  Martha Rosler is an American artist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. She graduated from Brooklyn College and the University of California, San Diego . Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture...
  
  
• Allen Ruppersberg
  Allen Ruppersberg
  Born in 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio. Allen Ruppersberg is one of the first generation of American Conceptual artists that changed the way art was thought about and made. His work includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books.- Biography :...
  
  
• Bodo Sperling
  Bodo Sperling
  Bodo Sperling is a German artist, painter and inventor.-Life:Bodo Sperling grew up in Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Amsterdam and Berlin....
  
  
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
  Hiroshi Sugimoto
  Hiroshi Sugimoto , born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.-Life and works:Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in...
  
  
• Stelarc
  Stelarc
  Stelarc is a Cypriot-Australian performance artist whose works focuses heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centred around his concept that the human body is obsolete...
  
  
• Tyler Turkle
  Tyler Turkle
  -History:Tyler Turkle was born May 29, 1947 in Alliance, Ohio. He received his B.A. in History in 1970 from Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio and studied cinematography at Kent State University. From 1975 to 1987 he taught art, photography, video and filmmaking in the School of Visual Arts at...
  
  
• Jacek Tylicki
  Jacek Tylicki
  Jacek Tylicki is an artist who settled in New York City in 1982.-Works:Tylicki's work is closely related to Land art, Installation, video and Photography...
  
  
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles
  Mierle Laderman Ukeles
  Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service oriented artwork. In 1969 she wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a "maintenance artist"...
  
  
• Wolf Vostell
  Wolf Vostell
  Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
  
  
• Gillian Wearing
  Gillian Wearing
  Gillian Wearing OBE RA is an English conceptual artist, one of the YBAs, and winner of the annual British fine arts award, The Turner Prize, in 1997. On 11 December 2007, Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London....
  
  
• Peter Weibel
  Peter Weibel
  Peter Weibel is an artist, curator and theoretician.Raised in Upper Austria he started to study French and cinematography in Paris...
  
  
• Lawrence Weiner
  Lawrence Weiner
  Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...
  
  
• Roger Welch
  Roger Welch
  William Roger Welch is an American conceptual artist, installation artist and video artist.-Biography:Roger Welch was born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1946 and graduated from Westfield High School in 1964....
  
  
• Christopher Williams
  Christopher Williams (artist)
  Christopher Williams is an American conceptual artist and fine art photographer. He is represented by David Zwirner, New York.-Academic career:Williams graduated from Grinnell College...
  
  

Further reading

Books:

• Peter Osborne
  Peter Osborne (writer and academic)
  Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Kingston University, London...
  
  , Conceptual Art (Themes and Movements), Phaidon, 2002 (See also the external links for Robert Smithson
  Robert Smithson
  Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
  
  )
• Klaus Honnef, Concept Art, Cologne: Phaidon, 1972
• Ermanno Migliorini, Conceptual Art, Florence: 1971
• Ursula Meyer, ed., Conceptual Art, New York: Dutton, 1972
• Lucy R. Lippard
  Lucy R. Lippard
  Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist and curator from the United States. Lippard was among the first writers to recognize the de-materialization at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art...
  
  , Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972. 1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
• Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973
• Juan Vicente Aliaga & José Miguel G. Cortés, ed., Arte Conceptual Revisado/Conceptual Art Revisited, Valencia: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 1990
• Thomas Dreher, Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976 (Thesis Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992
• Robert C. Morgan
  Robert C. Morgan
  Robert C. Morgan is an American art critic, art historian, curator, poet, and visual artist.-Background:Robert C. Morgan received his M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975 and his Ph.D. in contemporary art history from New York University in 1978...
  
  , Conceptual Art: An American Perspective, Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland, 1994
• Robert C. Morgan, Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
  
  , 1996
• Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, London: 1998
• Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson, ed., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press
  MIT Press
  The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
  
  , 1999
• John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, London and New York: Verso Books
  Verso Books
  Verso Books is a publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review. The company claims "global sales approaching $3 million per year and over 350 titles in print," possibly making it "the largest radical publisher in the English-language...
  
  , 2007
• Michael Newman & Jon Bird, ed., Rewriting Conceptual Art, London: Reaktion, 1999
• Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality, London: Thames & Hudson, 2001
• Daniel Marzona, Conceptual Art, Cologne: Taschen, 2005
• Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Practice, Myth, Cambridge, Mass.,: Cambridge University Press, 2004
• Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, Who's afraid of conceptual art?, Abingdon [etc.] : Routledge, 2010. - VIII, 152 p. : ill. ; 20 cm ISBN 0-415-42281-7 hbk : ISBN 978-0-415-42281-9 hbk : ISBN 0-415-42282-5 pbk : ISBN 978-0-415-42282-6 pbk

Exhibit catalogues:

• January 5–31, 1969, exh.cat., New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969
• When Attitudes Become Form, exh.cat., Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969
• 557,087, exh.cat., Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1969
• Konzeption/Conception, exh.cat., Leverkusen: Städt. Museum Leverkusen et al., 1969
• Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, exh.cat., New York: New York Cultural Center, 1970
• Art in the Mind, exh.cat., Oberlin, Ohio: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1970
• Information, exh.cat., New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970
• Software, exh.cat., New York: Jewish Museum, 1970
• Situation Concepts, exh.cat., Innsbruck: Forum für aktuelle Kunst, 1971
• Art conceptuel I, exh.cat., Bordeaux: capcMusée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1988
• L'art conceptuel, exh.cat., Paris: ARC–Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989
• Christian Schlatter, ed., Art Conceptuel Formes Conceptuelles/Conceptual Art Conceptual Forms, exh.cat., Paris: Galerie 1900–2000 and Galerie de Poche, 1990
• Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, exh.cat., Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995
• Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, exh.cat., New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999

See also

• Anti-anti-art
  Anti-anti-art
  Anti-anti-art is a stance proposed by the Stuckists in their manifestos outlining their art. In it, they take a particularly strong position in opposition to what is known as "anti-art"....
  
  
• Classificatory disputes about art
  Classificatory disputes about art
  Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today....
  
  
• Conceptual architecture
  Conceptual architecture
  Conceptual architecture is a term used to describe certain buildings and practices that make use of conceptualism in architecture. Conceptual architecture is characterized by an introduction of ideas or concepts from outside of architecture often as a means of expanding the discipline of architecture...
  
  
• Contemporary art
  Contemporary art
  Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
  
  
• Danger music
  Danger music
  Danger music is an experimental form of avant-garde 20th and 21st century classical music. It is based on the concept that some pieces of music can or will harm either the listener or the performer...
  
  
• Experiments in Art and Technology
• Found art
  Found art
  The term found art—more commonly found object or readymade—describes art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function...
  
  
• Gutai group
  Gutai group
  The Gutai group was an artistic movement and association of artists founded by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan in 1954...
  
  
• Information art
  Information art
  Information art is an emerging field of electronic art that synthesizes computer science, information technology, and more classical forms of art, including performance art, visual art, new media art and conceptual art...
  
  
• Installation art
  Installation art
  Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
  
  
• Intermedia
  Intermedia
  Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
  
  
• Land art
  Land art
  Land art, Earthworks , or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked...
  
  
• Modern art
  Modern art
  Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
  
  
• Moscow Conceptualists
  Moscow Conceptualists
  The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, movement began with the Sots art of Komar and Melamid in the early 1970s, and continued as a trend in Russian art into the 1980s...
  
  
• Neo-conceptual art
  Neo-conceptual art
  Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in the 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s...
  
  
• Net art
• Postmodern art
  Postmodern art
  Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath...
  
  
• Romantic conceptualism
  Romantic Conceptualism
  Romantic conceptualism is a strand of conceptual art which seeks to place emotion and a sense of 'the hand of the author' over the cold intellectualism of most conceptual art....
  
  
• Something Else Press
  Something Else Press
  Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by Higgins, Ray Johnson, Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, John Cage, Emmett Williams and others. The Something Else Press was an early publisher of...
  
  
• Systems art
  Systems art
  Systems art is art influenced by cybernetics, and systems theory, which reflects on natural systems, social systems and social signs of the art world itself....
  
  
• Video art
  Video art
  Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
  
  
• Visual arts
  Visual arts
  The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
  
  

Individual works

• Fountain
  Fountain (Duchamp)
  Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...
  
  
• One and Three Chairs
  One and Three Chairs
  One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a work by Joseph Kosuth. An example of conceptual art, the piece consists of a chair, a photograph of this chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair"...
  
  
• The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
  The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
  The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even , most often called The Large Glass , is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp....
  
  

External links

• Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"
• Conceptualism
• pdf file of An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963) containing Henry Flynt
  Henry Flynt
  Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
  
  's "Concept Art" essay at UbuWeb
  UbuWeb
  UbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
  
  
• Minus Space.com, reductive and concept-based art
• conceptual artists, books on conceptual art and links to further reading
• Conceptual Paradise - Wiki On Conceptual Art / Conceptual Artists