# Conceptual Art, Ideas, and Ontology  ## Metadata - Author: [[readwise.io]] - Full Title: Conceptual Art, Ideas, and Ontology - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the debate around conceptual art, particularly the thesis that "the medium is the idea." The author proposes a new view that conceptual artworks are artifacts that contain ideas, rather than being ideas themselves. This perspective helps clarify the relationship between the artwork and its idea, addressing some common objections to the original thesis. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/283668612 - Source File: Conceptual Art, Ideas, and Ontology by Cray.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > imbued ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq18jwcc96bd97d51pskz33)) - Note: huh > The medium, as understood by Goldie and Schellekens, is that which is central to our appre- ciation of a work.9 The means, on the other hand, are just that: the mere means by which we come to appreciate that work. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq1s8atwzwawp6hrajmx49p)) - Note: This is a pretty obscure thing to say. > LeWitt’s remark that, in concep- tual art, “the execution is a perfunctory affair” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq1tc0fehz8hbg5nsj7r2yt)) > But even if conceptual artworks are ideas, it cannot be that all ideas are works of art: Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection is not an artwork, and it does not seem that my idea for a conceptual artwork that I am going to create but have not yet created is really an artwork yet. What is it, then, that distinguishes the ideas that are artworks from those that are not? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq1y9hhmn02nc2ghk3mjxx4)) > This suggests that ideas cannot be the entities that serve as the referents of such that-clauses, namely, propositions. Reinforcing this point, Schellekens writes, of the 1970 Art Workers’ Coalition’s Q. And babies? A. And babies, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2cpcft0vzqdpjv60m0085)) > [the] contextualized photograph of human corpses strewn over a small road in South-East Asia brings the idea of injustice to us in a way that a mere statement of the event cannot. The power of the artwork, its artistic ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2dhzwjb7z0p77r13jc92n)) > value, cannot be reduced to the proposition ‘Innocent people have suffered tremendously as victims of US for- eign policy’. The image of the massacred women and children, together with the burning question and shock- ing answer painted over it enables us to appreciate the situation’s true callousness and horror.17 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2d2wznt8d4hvc81rzp9jf)) > According to it, ideas are historical partic- ulars, originating at particular times, in particular places, with particular agents. The account also lo- cates ideas in physical space,making them publicly accessible and giving us a convenient framework within which to understand their causal efficacy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2xqe1q5574crjy9k0q0j5)) > But when Darwin “came up with” the idea of evolution by natural selec- tion, he did not in any sense “come up with” the proposition that organisms evolved by natural se- lection. Ideas are not eternal abstracta;theyorig- inate within the minds of thinkers, at particular times and places. Propositions do not, so ideas should not be identified with propositions. We can run similar arguments that suggest that ideas should not be identified with senses, states of af- fairs, facts, or other, similar entities. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2j0chzth1h8t7mhsp89hb)) > But if ideas are not those sorts of things, what are they? Any adequate ontology of ideas, I take it, should satisfy certain criteria. First, whatever ideas are, they should be the sorts of things that we “come up with”—that is, creatable historical particulars. Second, they should be public rather than private: ideas are the sorts of things that we communally engage with. Third, ideas should be causally efficacious: they can inspire us, motivate us, instill in us happiness or distress, and so on. And fourth, ideas should have dynamic lives: they are the sorts of things that are capable of being spread, forgotten, and so on. Whatever account we offer should, at minimum, meet these criteria. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2ndmarv4794gn533e7a1e)) > Everett and Schroeder do think of ideas as physical things—specifically, as “distributed systems of contentful mental states” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpq2padqycdrwkp5kt2y6ndt)) ## New highlights added March 20, 2025 at 11:34 AM > intending to make an artwork that reiterates ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpscwpzswrag0c9wm85cx0tx)) - Note: can we make sense of this being 'the same idea' when Fred intends to to *re*iterate Duchamp's original? > Let us call these means *artifacts*, taken loosely here to include not only physical objects, events, activities, or other things created or modified by agents, but also natural and otherwise unmodified objects merely indicated or selected by agents.33 We might, then, take works to be mereological fusions of ideas and artifacts; on such a view, the urinal and Duchamp's idea are both proper parts of *Fountain*. This, however, will not do. Since mereological fusions are partially located where each of their parts is located, we would again face the aforementioned Location Objection: *Fountain* is partially located wherever anyone has the relevant idea, so *Fountain* is not wholly located just where we might think that it is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpscmhv3m9avr685af082axj)) > It does not. When we appreciate *Fountain*, we are appreciating the imbued urinal in part because it triggers in us further understanding and appreciation of Duchamp's idea, much like how we appreciate *Guernica* in part because it triggers in us certain attitudes about the bombing of Guernica in 1937. Furthermore, the aesthetic properties (or lack thereof) of the urinal do play into our appreciation of the work as a whole: as Cabenne documents, Duchamp purposefully chose objects that would inspire “visual indifference,” and the interplay between that indifference and the relevant idea is part of what makes the work so biting.38 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpsd4r6hsqgzyb3mdk5ftgfs)) ## New highlights added March 20, 2025 at 8:41 PM > Conceptual artworks, then, should be identified neither with ideas themselves nor with fusions of ideas and artifacts nor with sets of such things. I propose instead that conceptual artworks are *imbued artifacts*. They are physical objects, events, activities, or perhaps tokens of some other type of object—perhaps even ideas!—that stand in a special relation to certain ideas. *Fountain* is a urinal, but it is no mere urinal: it is a urinal that stands in a special relation to an idea that originated with Duchamp. Call this view the *Imbued Artifacts Account* (henceforth, *IAA*). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpsznxnzzdv4q2m0xtz3sjh6)) > For those who would rather avoid such worries, there is a third option. The friend of the IAA who prefers the Identity View could say that, while the works are strictly speaking the same object, the differences we attribute to them simply arise from the difference in roles that object can play in different contexts. When thought of as Duchamp's work, the work might be original, but when thought of as Rauschenberg's work, it might be derivative—the same object, that is, can take on different aesthetic properties depending on how it is conceived. Suppose that someone is both the president of the United States and a store manager. It is still true that the president has properties and powers that the manager does not, and vice versa, despite them being the same person, because the possession of those properties and powers largely depends on which role that person is playing in a context. The same, it seems, can be said for imbued artifacts.41 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jpt2apf2cq690z00x2y18hyg))