Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: And Now for Something Completely Different
- 1 The Back Story of Twentieth-Century Art
- 2 The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 3 The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century
- 4 The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
- 5 The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 6 Creating New Genres: Conceptual Artists at Work and Play in the Twentieth Century
- 7 And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
- 8 You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster
- 9 Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
- 10 Co-Authoring Advanced Art
- 11 Language in Visual Art
- 12 Portraits of the Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century
- 13 The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
- 14 The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century
- 15 Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Warhol and Hirst
- 16 The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: And Now for Something Completely Different
- 1 The Back Story of Twentieth-Century Art
- 2 The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 3 The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century
- 4 The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
- 5 The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 6 Creating New Genres: Conceptual Artists at Work and Play in the Twentieth Century
- 7 And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
- 8 You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster
- 9 Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
- 10 Co-Authoring Advanced Art
- 11 Language in Visual Art
- 12 Portraits of the Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century
- 13 The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
- 14 The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century
- 15 Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Warhol and Hirst
- 16 The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
It sometimes seems to me that the labor of the artist is of a very old-fashioned kind; the artist himself a survival, a craftsman or artisan of a disappearing species, working in his own room, following his own homemade empirical methods, living in untidy intimacy with his tools…Perhaps conditions are changing, and instead of this spectacle of an eccentric individual using whatever comes his way, there will instead be a picture-making laboratory, with its specialist officially clad in white, rubber-gloved, keeping to a precise schedule, armed with strictly appropriate apparatus and instruments, each with its appointed place and exact function…So far, chance has not been eliminated from practice, or mystery from method, or inspiration from regular hours; but I do not vouch for the future.
Paul Valéry, 1936In 1955, in the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the French philosopher Étienne Gilson, a member of the Académie Française, presented his analysis of the art of painting. These lectures were published in both English and French in 1958. Early in this discussion, Gilson reflected on the essence of painting:
The nature of painting is such that the artist who conceives the work is also the one who executes it. This proposition is not necessarily true of the sculptor, but it is assuredly true of the painter. Except for tasks of secondary importance that can easily be left to his assistants, it is the painter himself who confers the material and physical existence upon the work he conceives.
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- Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art , pp. 184 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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