Conceptualism Comes of Age, Finally

The notion that art is about more than objects, and that artists and their ideas are as significant as the works they create for public display, developed in the 1960s and ’70s, and a new exhibit in Baltimore aims to deconstruct the movement which would eventually become known as ‘conceptual art.’ “Forty years ago, a small group of artists challenged the idea that works of art were about showing off the genius of a maker’s hand — a notion that had lasted right from Raphael and Rembrandt through to Jackson Pollock. The works they used to make that challenge still feel powerful and exciting, sometimes even radical and unsettling, all this while later. Sometimes they look gorgeous, too.”