Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology

This anthology is a very good collection of some of the more pertinent writings (and some examples) of conceptual art. 

What struck me is that most of the writings from the artists who began the "movement" (and if there is one thing this collection makes clear, it's that it is impossible to speak of conceptual art as a "movement" in any sort of easy, art-historical terms) in the mid to late 1960s reflect their each artist's own concerns with the commodity status of art and the gallery system (or the sense of stagnation in art circles of that time). However, most of those writing are entirely incoherent to someone entering them (like me) from the outside. I was much more impressed by the work that began to appear in the 1970s that sought to seriously theorize what was going on and what the various social and economic problems were that these artists were wanting to take on, change, or avoid. Much of t his work is theorized in Marxist form (though some do use some of the continental structuralist and poststructuralist theories that would make up "postmodernism"), and much of that theoretical work is very impressive indeed. The best of it, paradoxically, shows how weak how much of a failure much of the work of conceptual artists actually was (such as the work of Adrian Piper and Benjamin H. D. Buchloe). Most of the "theory" put forth by Art and Language (in either its British or New York collectives) is terrible, Stalinist crap, including most everything included here by Joseph Kosuth (who, early on and especially by the 1980s and 1990s, seemed much more interested in settling personal scores than in theorizing about art or the art system more generally).

What is missing from this anthology is more of the contemporary voices from the 1960s and 1970s who were not very impressed by conceptual art (there is one article from the time in this category and one retrospective account published here). Otherwise, this is a very deep and interesting collection that illuminates the complexities of the situation(s) around conceptual art both at the time and in various forms of retrospection