Is Conceptual Art Exhausted ?

These reflections were prompted by going to see the exhibition Glamourie in Leeds, where my cousin Harry Meadley is among artists showing their work: http://www.glamourie.co.uk/

I would like to preface these remarks with a piece of rhyme written by me some time ago, which may be borne in mind through everything that follows. It's called Aesthetics Solved.


There are only two rules in aesthetics -
The rest are just imposture & prosthetics.
The first concerns the spectator
Which is, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder:
The second concerns the doer -
Which is (there was never one truer)
There's more than one way to skin a cat -
And that, my dear Doctor, is that.


Many people are suspicious and dismissive of conceptual art. "Why can't they paint proper paintings ?" is a line often taken. "Proper landscapes like Hockney is doing at the moment or proper portraits like Lucian Freud. They do this stuff because they can't draw !" Many people think conceptual art is a con, & at best they are just having their leg pulled by someone they would refuse the title 'Artist' to. Others think that although conceptual art had something going for it in its early days in the hands of its pioneers, Duchamp especially, it's now played out, its practitioners just repeating the same old formulas.

No doubt most conceptual art isn't very good, but in this it only resembles everything else, most of everything isn't very good: most thrillers, most television programmes, most pop music, most poetry, most plays, most figurative art, most self-help books and so on.

I would investigate this question of is conceptual art exhausted by means of analogies. If someone painted a near-perfect Impressionist landscape (that style is about 150 years old), or a picture in the pure cubist style (100 years old), my reaction for one would be "Very nice -but what's the point ?" Similarly if a jazz musician insisted on composing in the Be Bop style (70 years old). Is conceptual art like this ?

There is another analogy though. Let us say that conceptual art starts with Duchamp's Fountain in 1917. It is thus about 100 years old. Figurative art in its modern sense began in the first half of the Fifteenth century in Italy & the Netherlands. For convenience, we could pinpoint Masaccio's The Holy Trinity (c. 1427) in Santa Maria Novella in Florence & van Eyck's The Arnolfini Wedding (1434) in the National gallery in London as prime examples of the new style. 100 years later takes us to Cranach, Hans Holbein, Durer, Breugel the Elder, Michelangelo, Titian, Giorgione to name but a few of the titans of that time. Can I seriously say that figurative art as a style was exhausted by then ? Rembrandt, Velazquez, David, Goya to name only four Masters lie as yet unknown & hidden in the future, beyond this 100 year deadline.

To take another analogy, is Blues exhausted as a form ? One starting point for Blues as a recorded form we can say Bessie Smith in 1923, or for Delta Blues, Charlie Patton in 1929. Some would argue that Blues is played out. I however think that it has life left in it.

Similarly, is Philosophy exhausted ? It started, according to tradition, in 585 BCE with the work of Thales of Miletus. That's a long time ago. Despite this, as far as I am concerned, it is most definitely not exhausted, it is still going strong.

I can see no reason that a style or method of approach is limited definitely to 100 years or thereabouts of life. If conceptual art as a style has the vigour that figurative art has already demonstrated, then it is by no means exhausted.