all art is conceptual

once again (like in `conceptual art vs. beauty') the title says it all. but my students still liked me to explain what i mean with:

all art is conceptual

oh very well. i'll try to explain what i mean, even though the nature of the postmodern fashion of vagueness and quasi-profundity is such that one doesn't of course explain anything about quasi-profound statements, one just adds to them with new quasi-profound commentaries. once again i forsake my chances of ever becoming a successful postmodernist ;-)

so why is all art conceptual, imnsho? because, as i see it, any art work references our human existence, our human experience, our human views and emotions, our human maps of reality and fantasy and ...

in other words, as wittgenstein pointed out so obviously and yet so beautifully in his tractatus logico-philosophicus:

wir machen uns

bilder der welt

literally translated: we create for ourselves images of the world. the meaning is to me, that any image that we create of the world, is by necessity a conceptual reference. it is a map, pointing to something in the real world, the direct world (like the direct beauty i talked about in the previous post). somehow we humans have the capacity AND yearning for developing references, communicating such references, analyzing references etcetera. you could say there is a fair risk that we spend most of our times poring over our maps of our worlds...and forget to go out and experience these worlds directly.

therefore to me, what distinguishes art from nature is its referential character. precisely this referential character is what makes all art conceptual. so why coin the phrase `conceptual art'?

(to be continued in the next post)