Aesthetics is broader in scope than the philosophy of art, which comprises one of its branches. At a very basic level aesthetics involves the knowledgeable appreciation of art, an enquiry toward art for purposes of examination, refinement, and elaboration.

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. Conceptual art referred to as , an art in which the concepts or ideas involved in the work take dominance over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. . In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work or  an artist uses a conceptual form of art.

 

 

The term ‘concept art’ had been used by Henry Flynt of the Fluxus group  in the early 1960s. This term first used by the American critic Lucy Lippard in the form of a book, 'Six Years  in 1973'. The movement that emerged in the mid 1960s and continued until the mid 1970s was international, happening more or less simultaneously across Europe, North America and South America .

 

 

Artists associated with the movement attempted to bypass the increasingly commercialized art world by stressing thought processes and methods of production as the value of the work.

CONCEPTUAL ART

Few artistic movements have attracted so much controversy and debate as conceptual art. By its nature, conceptual art has a tendency to provoke intense and perhaps even extreme reactions in its audiences.

 

While some people find

1.     conceptual art very refreshing and relevant, many others consider it shocking, distasteful, and

2.     conspicuously lacking in craftsmanship.

3.     Some even simply deny that it is art at all.

4.     Conceptual art, it seems, is something that we either love or hate.

 

ART  AS IDEA

The most fundamentally revisionary feature of conceptual art is the way in which it proclaims itself to be an art of the mind rather than the senses: it rejects traditional artistic media because it locates the artwork at the level of ideas rather than that of objects.

Because creative process tends to be given more weight than physical material, and because art should be about intellectual inquiry and reflection rather than beauty and aesthetic pleasure (as traditionally conceived.

 

For conceptual art, ‘the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’ (LeWitt 1967, 166). Art is ‘de-materialized’, and in this sense held to be prior to its materialization in any given object.

 

The claim that the conceptual artwork is to be identified with an idea that may be seen to underlie it has far-reaching ramification. It not only affects the ontology (Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as existence, being, becoming, and reality. ) of the conceptual artwork but also profoundly alters the role of the artist by casting her in the role of thinker rather than object-maker.

 

 

SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION

For all these reasons, the kind of representation employed in conceptual artworks is best described in terms of the transmission of ideas. In conceptual art, the representation at work can generally be seen as semantic rather than illustrative.

 

That is to say, it sets out to have and convey a specific meaning rather than to depict a scene, person or event. Even in cases where a work makes use of illustrative representation, conceptual art is still putting that representation to a distinctively semantic use, in the sense of there being an intention to represent something one cannot see with the naked eye. Accordingly, the conceptual artist’s task is to contemplate and formulate this meaning – to be a ‘meaning-maker’.