RE-DEFINING ART AS TEXT in the POSTMODERN ERA Postmodernism promises endless creative play in contrast to Modernism, which, according to Roland Barthes (1916-1980), was a fraudulent attempt to find the universal in every solution. For Barthes, Structuralism, or the...
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONCEPTUAL ART PART TWO “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” Ad Reinhardt The artist, Joseph Kosuth, insisted that Conceptual Art was a child of the 1960s, not the Civil Rights sixties, not the Stonewall sixties, not the...
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MINIMAL ART PART ONE To discuss the relationships of artists to any particular philosopher or to discuss the relationship of any work of art to philosophy is to enter upon dangerous ground. First, artists are not philosophers. They may study...
ART AS IDEA—IDEA AS ART At mid-century, the question of what is art? was raised again for the first time since Emmanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment in 1781. Starting in the mid-fifties, Neo-Dada art and Minimal Art challenged the presumed Modernist...
Painting in the Seventies The 1970s presided over the widely publicized “end of painting.” What the phrase really means is the Modernist painting came to an end. One one hand, the object itself disappeared, swallowed up into Conceptual Art. On the other...