Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art was a movement emerging in the mid-1960s that held the idea behind a work to be its essential content, with physical execution, or even a finished object at all, treated as secondary or dispensable, a position Sol LeWitt stated directly in his 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art: the idea becomes a machine that makes the art. Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, presenting a physical chair alongside a photograph of it and a dictionary definition of the word chair, and the collective Art & Language's text-based investigations exemplify the movement's shift away from traditional media toward language, documentation and instruction as the work itself. Reacting against the market-driven object fetishism critics associated with late Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Conceptual Art's dematerialization of the art object, a term coined by critic Lucy Lippard, opened directly onto the Land Art, Performance Art and Institutional Critique that followed through the 1970s.