Many people claim that art is dead. The grand pieces that were truly art belonged to a time that will never return. Now, it’s all rotten—a pity, a joke, a scam. Of course, they’re referring to Conceptual Art. One only needs to compare a Rembrandt to Cattelan’s banana taped to the wall, and the feeling of utter disappointment comes as no surprise. “This is not art”, we tend to say, more and more often. 

 

And yet, throughout history, people have often claimed that certain works are not art, only to be proven wrong. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Manet’s Olympia, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Joyce’s Ulysses—all were dismissed and judged poorly in their milieu. Are we not at risk of falling into the same trap when judging conceptual art? Could it be that we’re failing to see what’s in front of us—and that, in time, today’s absurd works will be rightly and undoubtedly celebrated as art? 

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The answer is no, and the reason is simple. Most works that were once dismissed as not art turned out to be misunderstood—they were seen as bad art for their time, not as something outside the realm of art altogether. But with conceptual art, the issue is different. There’s a critical distinction between saying that a brick in the middle of a gallery is a bad work of art and recognising that the brick isn’t art at all. The first is a qualitative judgment; the second, a matter of classification. And it is precisely this failure to grasp the classification mistake that gave rise to the empire of confusion we now live in. 

 

It all goes back to Marcel Duchamp. You might be surprised to know that he started out as a painter, in the way Cézanne was a painter, Monet was a painter, and Raphael was a painter. He worked in a fairly traditional way, at least in terms of technique, if not always in style. But at some point, he got bored. In an interview, he said he had grown tired of visual products and had become more interested in ideas. 

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Exploring ideas wasn’t new in the art world. What was new was giving them primary importance. Before Duchamp, ideas were filtered through art. After Duchamp, art was filtered through ideas. This shift was crucial: the sensory nature of art began to fade, while its conceptual dimension rose in demand. Duchamp gave his ideas physical form so people could go to a museum and look at them. Why? I doubt even he had a clear answer. 

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One only needs to study Duchamp a little to see he was the kind of genius who became one by being in the right place at the right time with the right personality and a bit of creative flair—but not necessarily because of deep intellectual or artistic merit.

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Duchamp’s most famous work is, of course, Fountain. It marked the beginning of the absurd contemporary art trend we suffer most today: conceptual art. Fountain is hugely important in art history—but let’s be clear: (1) it is not an artwork, and (2) it matters so much only because it was the first. If it were presented today, it would be dismissed as ridiculous, just like its many recent imitations (here’s an article Artsy wrote on why toilets keep popping up in Contemporary Art). Its importance lies in having opened the door to an allegedly new art form. 

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Because Duchamp was respected and well-known, the art world accepted his gesture as art. But the real confusion is this: Duchamp was experimenting with ideas, not with art. He was giving material form to his thoughts, not creating artworks. He was rebelling against the art institutions, but he wasn’t making art. And we can prove this with one fundamental truth: art, first and foremost, is the work, not the concept. 

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Some defenders of conceptual art argue that the concept is the work—that the idea is what matters, not its physical expression. In this view, a brick placed in the middle of a gallery is art simply because it results from an artistic process, intention, or expression. Anything of that sort, they claim, qualifies as art. Moreover, they argue that anything that enters the art world and is recognised by the public or institutions as art is, by that very recognition, art.

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However, they are mistaken—or more precisely, they are confused. This line of reasoning would group together a publicist designing a shampoo campaign, Michelangelo painting a Madonna, and Duchamp presenting a urinal. But the differences between these cases lie in three key aspects: intention, mode of stimulation, and form of presentation.

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The publicist, even if the campaign is hand-drawn and visually impressive, aims to increase sales by appealing to consumer desire and presents the result explicitly as advertising. Michelangelo, by contrast, creates a work that seeks to evoke beauty, power, or reverence; it aims to stimulate both the senses and the intellect, and it is presented as art. Duchamp, on the other hand, places a urinal in a gallery to make a conceptual point. The physical object is secondary; it offers no sensory experience, only intellectual engagement. He does not present a work of art, but an idea camouflaged as one.

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Once this distinction is understood, the categories become clear: the first belongs to advertising, the second to the realm of art, and the third to the world of conceptual experimentation. They differ in nature, and each belongs to a different category.

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If, in a work, the concept is what matters most, then it is a conceptual work, not a work of art. An artwork is a materially embodied form of expression created with the intention of causing an experience of beauty, horror, joy, suffering, or the like. It is presented in a way that signals its artistic nature, and it appeals not only to the intellect but also to the senses. Art makes you feel and think. If it only makes you think, then it is not art.

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All conceptual art follows from Duchamp’s Readymades—that’s where the confusion began. From that moment on, few stopped to ask whether prioritising the concept was actually consistent with the fundamentals of art. We simply kept going, under the illusion that it was—driven by the collective belief that it must be true. But let’s not be afraid to say what many of us already think and argue: conceptual experimentation can be beautiful, just as a mathematical formula can be. But neither is art.

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Ignorance has become the most common product in today’s art world. From artists to gallerists, critics to audiences, they all seem to celebrate it. Still, one thing is certain: art is not dead—and probably never will be. Proper art exists. You just have to look in the right places.