1. Approaching Conceptual Art
Conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists, the most important of whom soon went on to do other things.
Conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present
e.g. Art and Language
Joseph Kosuth accused the historian Benjamin Buchloh of partisanship and bias after Buchloh had accused him for falsifying his role in the movement's origins.
another example: Mel Bochner vs Lucy Lippard
The critic and historian Charles Harrison regards Conceptual art, particularly the work of the Art & Language group, not as break with modernist principles in the name of re-engagement with social modernity, but as a necessary re-formulation of the grounds of art's critical independence.
The present book has located the Archimedean point from which a fully finished accout of Conceptual art may be levered into the edifice of art history.
