Guide · Conceptual art
What conceptual art is and how to look at it.
Conceptual art is art in which the idea matters more than the finished object. The work can be an instruction, a document, a text or an everyday object placed in a new context, and it asks the viewer to complete it by thinking.
Daleki Art curatorial team · Reviewed on
In short
- What it is
- Art in which the idea matters more than the finished object.
- Precedent
- Marcel Duchamp submits Fountain, a signed urinal, in 1917.
- The name
- Henry Flynt writes about “concept art” in 1961; Sol LeWitt defines it in Artforum in 1967.
- In Latin America
- Tucumán Arde (1968), Cildo Meireles (1970) and Antonio Caro (1976) take the idea to the street and to politics.
- How to look
- Read the artist's decision before the form, and let the work open a question.
The idea first
A work that begins with a decision.
In conceptual art the work happens in the idea. The object can be beautiful, fragile or almost absent; what counts is the decision behind it and the question it leaves open. That is why a conceptual work can take the form of an instruction, a photograph, a text, a map or an everyday object taken out of place.
That shift moves the viewer too. In front of a traditional painting you can stay on the surface. In front of a conceptual work you need to ask what the artist chose, what they left out and why. The work is completed in that conversation.
Putting the idea first doesn't make the object irrelevant. Many conceptual works have a carefully made material body: iron, wool, paper, wood, light. The material serves the idea rather than the other way around.
A short history
From a signed urinal to the conceptualisms of the South.
- 1917
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain
A factory-made urinal, turned on its back and signed “R. Mutt”, submitted to an exhibition in New York. Choosing an object and changing its context was already a way of making art. It is the most cited readymade in history.
- 1961
Henry Flynt, “Concept Art”
The American musician and philosopher uses the term for an art whose material is concepts. The essay was published in 1963 in An Anthology, edited by La Monte Young.
- 1965
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs
A chair, a photograph of it and the dictionary definition of “chair”. Three ways of presenting the same thing, none truer than the others.
- 1967
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”
Writing in Artforum, LeWitt argues that in conceptual art the idea is the most important part of the work and execution can be almost perfunctory. His wall drawings exist as instructions that other people carry out.
- 1968
Tucumán Arde and dematerialization
In Argentina, artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires turn research into the crisis in Tucumán into a work and a public denunciation. The same year Lucy Lippard and John Chandler publish “The Dematerialization of Art”.
- 1969
When Attitudes Become Form
At the Kunsthalle Bern, Harald Szeemann gathers processes, actions and ideas instead of finished objects. The show changed how contemporary art is curated.
- 1970
Cildo Meireles and Information
Meireles prints messages on returnable Coca-Cola bottles and sends them back into circulation: Insertions into Ideological Circuits. In New York, MoMA opens Information, curated by Kynaston McShine.
- 1976
Antonio Caro, Colombia
The Colombian artist writes “Colombia” in the Coca-Cola typeface. With a minimal graphic gesture he sets national identity and a global brand in conversation.
- 1999
Global Conceptualism
The Queens Museum in New York presents Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, showing conceptual practices that emerged in parallel in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
- 2007
Luis Camnitzer, Didactics of Liberation
The Uruguayan artist publishes his study of conceptualism in Latin America and proposes telling it apart from Anglo-American conceptual art: here the idea was, above all, a tool for thinking about social reality.
Latin America
Conceptualisms with their feet on the street.
In Latin America, conceptual practices grew amid dictatorships and deep inequality. Many of them went beyond reflecting on art itself: they used information channels, bottles, newspapers and the street as their medium. Luis Camnitzer proposed calling them conceptualisms to mark that difference.
That tradition is why Daleki Art starts with the region's studios. Chapter 01 of the fund was acquired in Colombia, and its works speak to themes that history left open: inheritance, territory, material and memory.
See the works in the fundHow to look
Five questions for any conceptual work.
- 01
Read the label before the form
Title, year and medium are often part of the work. A title can completely change what you see.
- 02
Look for the decision
Ask what the artist chose and what they left out. In conceptual art, the decision is the main gesture.
- 03
Find the rule
Many works follow an instruction, a system or a repetition. Finding it is how you get inside the work.
- 04
Look at the place
A work changes with where it lives. Notice what it does to the space and what the space does to it.
- 05
Ask your own question
End with a question of your own, not an answer. If the work left you thinking, it did its job.
Art to live with
Why a conceptual work belongs in a workplace.
A conceptual work asks for time: you understand it better in the third week than on the first day. The places where people work and make decisions give it exactly that, a daily life with people who keep looking again.
Daleki Art places works from the fund with companies and institutions for seasons of 3, 6, 9 or 12 months, through cultural sponsorship. Each work arrives with a curatorial proposal, professional installation and a condition report, and we stay with it until it is removed or rotated.
Glossary
The words of conceptual art.
Terms from art history and from Daleki Art's own vocabulary, with the definition we use across the site.
- Conceptual art
- Conceptual art is art in which the idea matters more than the finished object. The work can be an instruction, a document, a text or an everyday object placed in a new context, and it asks the viewer to complete it by thinking.
- Conceptualism
- The name Latin American criticism, with Luis Camnitzer, gives to practices that use the idea as a tool for thinking about the social and political reality of their context.
- Readymade
- A manufactured object that the artist chooses and presents as a work, sometimes with minimal intervention. Marcel Duchamp turned it into a method in the 1910s.
- Dematerialization
- An idea set out by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in 1968: the work loses weight as an object and gains weight as an idea, process, document or information.
- Instruction-based work
- A work that exists as a set of directions someone else can carry out. Sol LeWitt's wall drawings are the classic example.
- Site-specific work
- A work conceived for a particular place. If the site changes, what the work says changes too.
- Institutional critique
- Practices that take museums, galleries and the art market as their subject and expose the rules that decide what gets seen and how.
- Documentation
- Photographs, texts, plans and records that, for many conceptual works, are the form in which the work exists and circulates.
- Work record
- The data that accompanies a work: artist, title, year, medium and dimensions. At Daleki Art it also states the chapter and the country where the work was acquired.
- Provenance
- The documented history of a work: where it comes from, whose hands it passed through and how it reached the fund.
- Condition report
- A document describing a work's state when it is installed and when it is removed, with photographs and notes. It is the memory of its care.
- Curation
- The work of choosing, arranging and explaining works for a particular place and audience.
- Cultural sponsorship
- Support from a company or institution for a cultural project. At Daleki Art it is how an organization joins the movement and lives with a work from the fund for a season.
- Season
- A period of 3, 6, 9 or 12 months during which a work from the fund lives in a space.
- Chapter
- Each acquisition trip of the fund. Chapter 01 took place in Colombia. A chapter's country tells you where the work was acquired, not the artist's nationality.
- Museum without a building
- How Daleki Art describes its model: works circulate through living rooms such as offices, lobbies and boardrooms instead of staying inside one venue.
Frequently asked questions
What people ask us most.
- What is conceptual art?
- Conceptual art is art in which the idea matters more than the finished object. The work can be an instruction, a document, a text or an everyday object placed in a new context, and it asks the viewer to complete it by thinking.
- How is conceptual art different from contemporary art?
- Contemporary art names a period: art made today and over the last decades of the twentieth century. Conceptual art names an attitude: putting the idea first. A great deal of contemporary art has conceptual roots, but not all of it does. See the short history
- Does a conceptual work need an object?
- Not always. It can be an instruction, a text, an action or a document. Many conceptual works do have a carefully made material body; what matters is that the object serves the idea.
- “Anyone could do that”: why does it count as art?
- That reaction is part of the game. The execution is often simple on purpose. The work lies in the decision that turns a simple gesture into a question nobody had asked before, and in a practice that sustains that question over time. Five questions for looking at a work
- What does “conceptual art fund” mean?
- It is the collection Daleki Art brings together so the works can circulate. Each work enters with a public record (artist, year, medium, dimensions and the country where it was acquired) and stays in our care as it moves from one space to the next. It is an art collection: it offers no shares, no returns and no financial product of any kind. See the works in the fund
Sources and further reading
- Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, Artforum, June 1967.
- Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art”, Art International, February 1968.
- Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 1973.
- Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy”, Studio International, 1969.
- Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999.
- Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, University of Texas Press, 2007.