Conceptual Art - Why 02

Consider: if there were no art, music, film, literature, etc., then we would never feel emotions except when they were evoked by events in our own lives. By doing this, art - like dreams - teaches us how to cope with strong emotions. Conceptual art does not fulfil this function. It is closer to being a visual riddle than a gateway to passionate emotions; inane, trite and pretentious. Art Transcends the Personal Thirdly, art is about transcending the personal.

An artist takes his own personal experiences and distils them to a set of universal, human motifs that the audience can identify with. Picasso's Guernica encapsulates a sense of horror, revulsion, chaos, aggression and turmoil that we all instinctively recognise. The historical context of the painting and the personal circumstances of its creation amplify and help place these emotions, but they are not necessary to experience the disorder and violence encoded in the piece. Picasso has taken historical events and his own personal experiences of them, and created something that embodies a universal aspect of the human.

In many cases, it is not necessary to have any contextual information at all. A musician takes his personal experiences and uses them to write a song: about love, betrayal, redemption, tragedy, etc. Millions of people might hear that song and relate it to events in their own lives; it may exactly describe their situation and help them deal with their problems. The personal experiences of the musician who wrote it are not only irrelevant, they actually detract from this process. They would change the song from being about a universal experience and pin it down to some trivial details of someone whose life the audience knows little about and cannot relate to. An important consequence of this process - maybe even the function of it - is that the audience gains a sense of catharsis. The message is that you are not alone.

Billions of human beings have experienced what you are experiencing, and understand. Conceptual art does not do this. It doesn't convey universal human themes, or allow the audience to transcend their personal experiences. There is no sense of catharsis to be gained from Rauschenberg's telegram. Family Resemblance Art is universally recognisable as art. Art creates a sacred space. Art allows us to transcend the personal. Conceptual "art" does not fulfil any of these criteria. The last two points are purely functional, but the first requires more examination. Why is art universally recognisable? The twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated that we cannot give any definition of a word which does not presuppose our ability to use it.