So, heeeeeeere comes the bitch train. Chooooo chooooo. 

Let me say right off the bat that I am very tired and this is going to sound all over the place, but I need to say it.

I don’t get it.

I don’t see the value.

I’ve tried.

I’m always at the same place.

I’ll sit down, after I’ve drawn all of these forms, these painstaking, beautiful, personal, delightful forms and I’ll sit there and wonder if they are good enough.

If my personal, professional, tender drawings are good enough to become objects. Or, even further, if I am deserving of the ability to create objects or even use the ones I have now.

This is all due to conceptual art.

Wikipedia defines conceptual art as:

“Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.”

But my instructor continually tells me it’s sort of like this thing where you have to have a reason for everything, and there has to be this theme, and it has to seem like you thought about it for a really really really long time.

It’s nearly impossible for me to make an honest piece of art under those conditions.

There are reasons.

Reason 1: Cost/interaction or choice of materials (that being that I want to make a piece of physical art)

Let’s say my conceptual ideas behind my work was to make work about werewolves. So I decide that the appropriate material for creating the work would be silver (because I am anti-werewolf for whatever reason).

I cannot afford silver. So how do I make the work? Do I save the idea for later when I can afford silver? What if I cannot afford to purchase materials at all? How do I make any sort of work with conceptual value if I cannot choose my material in an exacting way? This makes the work, if the work needs to be a physical thing, a very difficult process. Justification for the material is not only difficult, it is hindering. 

Reason 2: Everything is conceptual already anyway.

Art is intrinsically conceptual. You think “Oh, I think I would like to sculpt a giant penguin” So you make a giant penguin. Great. Why did you do it? “Because I wanted to make a giant penguin”

PERFECT. GREAT. HONESTY FOR ONCE IN MY GODDAMN LIFE.

That honest intention of just wanting to make something for the sake of making is all you need. It’s perfect. It’s not pretentious, it’s not difficult to understand, and it’s not of any lesser value than any other idea. It’s a very tangible idea, lots of people can get behind that. People do this ALL THE TIME. It’s a lovely, beautiful universal and for anyone to call it lesser because some one didn’t brood in their cigarette fume filled apartment for hours trying to come up with something is wrong.

So if I decide to make anything, I’ve made a piece of conceptual art. It’s conceptual because I made the fucking thing. No other reasons needed.

Reason 3: I think it just makes bad art literally due to the way a conceptual artist thinks.

9 times out of 10 if your piece has some lofty concept or idea about some social thing or whatever and it’s put against a aesthetic, technical, beautiful, inventive piece that has no meaning other than the humble beauty that it displays, you are going to lose to the second piece.

This is because the conceptual artist has made the mistake that people want to listen to what they have to say through their art. Art is really a terrible mode of communication, especially for ideas. Art however is really good about communicating feelings.

The second piece probably communicates a feeling that people are craving. So they lust after the object, they spend time with it, it wins them over, they take pictures of it, it receives praise. The other piece, whatever it is about, is largely ignored and goes over the heads of people, it makes them feel stupid, stigmatizes them for their ignorance about their own preconceptions of art, and supplies no value to their lives. They don’t look at the piece and feel anything, and they don’t want to read a huge fucking pamphlet about why the object you made is important. They want something from your art, some enrichment for the soul, and if your art is about, say, the Iraq war, or about pollution, while topical to the climate and to polotics, it doesn’t enrich the soul. It barely enriches the mind. It mostly becomes another pointless piece of propaganda that will be swept away to be stored somewhere and cataloged because it belongs will all the other historical objects of the time. It becomes dated. It eventually no longer informs. 

Now, to finish this terrible essay:

Basically, when I make something, I want to make something because I want to experience the feeling I am going to get when the object that I desire to make is fully actualized in the way I desired to make it. Essentially, I want to make the art that I want to see manifested in the world.

There is more to this idea, these feelings, but right now, I am tired, I got out what I needed to say, and I am going to take a nap and eat dinner.