Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?
That was the headline on an op-ed in The New York Times the other day by Dennis Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution and co-founder and co-editor of Arts & Letters Daily. The piece was pegged to the auction of a medicine cabinet by Damien Hirst. A key passage:
Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.
But Dutton was really writing about the importance of art to humans, and the future of art. He takes a dim view of conceptual art, and opines on its future — implying, to me at least, that he wishes the time of the current generation of conceptual artists would pass. “We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture,” he writes.
He concludes this way:
I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.
But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.
I’m with Dutton on sharks and vacuum cleaners. My main question is why he couched his argument in terms of art’s investment value — but then again, I haven’t read his book, which may have made his argument head-on. Here’s a link to the NYT piece.