Excerpt from David Joselit's "American Art Since 1945" on Conceptual Art
"A wide range of art objects of the late 1960s and 1970s were produced by channelling flows of information into systems, processes, and feedback loops. Such transformations in the art work presupposed equally significant changes in the art worker. No longer aspiring to be masters of a particular medium, many artists began to function as 'managers' or 'producers' of information. For those associated with the practices known as Conceptual art - including several of the figures discussed in the previous chapter - this changed relationship between an artist and his or her product became an essential component of aesthetic practice. While later in the 1970s many artists would emphasize the experiences and conditions of particular identities based on gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, earlier Conceptual artists - who were predominantly white men - tended to adopt a more universalizing rhetoric in their philosophical propositions about art. In his pivotal essay of 1969, 'Art After Philosophy,' Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) explicitly stated this position. Kosuth reasoned that since art consists of formal languages or codes, its nature is fundamentally linguistic: 'In other words,' he writes, 'the propositions of art are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art.' Implicit in this passage are the two most influential characterizations of Conceptual art made by Kosuth: that art should consist of the artist's linguistic propositions, and the the content of art should be its own ongoing definition."
Excerpt from David Joselit's "American Art Since 1945" on Conceptual Art
