[Julie Steiner]

Heh! Here's what grasshopper (M. A. Griffiths) had to say about it, in bold below, 16 December 2001 (posted to a private list associated with The Poetry Kit):

The idea behind Conceptual Art, if I understand it correctly, is that it is not the actual artwork or installation that is important but the Concept behind it – as in the famous pile of bricks, which were ordinary bricks in a pile, but labelled as a work of art. The trouble with this, I feel, is that it depends too much on context, so you could re-christen it Contextual Art. In other words, it needs a sort of parenthesis to identity it as Art, and not just a pile of bricks or a dirty old bed or a crumpled piece of paper.

But if something only becomes Art through its context, I think we have the right to question its worth.

Being experimental doesn’t necessarily make something good or exciting. I don’t think we have to make a pilgrimage to the Tate before deciding there is something uninviting and vacuous about a room with a light flashing on and off. Surely this Concept had been explored in terms of space by architecture (in a functional way) and in terms of light by films and television (in an entertaining way).

Commenting on this Concept is not the same thing as commenting on a poem, because a poem has its own separate existence – it is not just a Concept.

With the Concept, the spectator is expected to do most of the work. As a spectator, I am not prepared to accept this. The artist should do most of the work, or what’s an artist for? We can all collect our own bits of rubbish, give the result a posey title, and put it on a plinth. Does this have any less value than what is often presented in galleries as Art, because it bears an Artist’s name?

What I often see today is Junk Art to go with our junk food, and a series of flashy and/or pretentious gimmicks treated with hushed reverence. I am told these are deep and meaningful, but I am not convinced, which I’m sure labels me as a Philistine.

What is often ignored is the simple truth that being traditional doesn’t mean something is automatically bad, and being new doesn’t mean something is automatically good.

Artworks cited above:

In 1976, the Tate Gallery’s purchase of US artist Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (consisting of 140 bricks) sparked one of the great modern art controversies.

My Bed, exhibited at the Tate in 1999 when shortlisted for the Turner Prize, consisted of British artist Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, used condoms, menstrual blood, and assorted other objects in disarray.

Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1994), was one of Martin Creed’s most famous works before his Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227, the lights going on and off (2001). The latter consisted of an empty room with its electric lights switching on and off in five-second intervals.