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Arts & Letters

The Case Against Conceptual Art

Trevor Pateman makes the case for the prosecution.

Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (2017) is an impressive piece of recent autobiographical fiction. In it, the narrator repeatedly sets herself the task of identifying a work of art – usually a work of conceptual art – which relates to whatever topic she’s currently thinking about.

Some of the works are well-known, such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) and Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1967), but most are more obscure. Though at the end of her book Baume urges us to go to the works ourselves, she has accidentally illustrated the main weakness of conceptual art: you don’t have to see it (or otherwise experience it) in order to respond to it. You just need a description spelling out the idea – the thought – that the actual artwork itself was created to illustrate.

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