Review Essay: The artist out of work?

Reflecting in 1973 on the recent history of Conceptual Art,1 Lucy Lippard remarked: ‘Hopes that “conceptual art” would be able to avoid the general commercialization, the destructively “progressive” approach of modernism, were for the most part unfounded. It seemed in 1969 … that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money, or much of it, for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed, words spoken but not recorded.’2 Lippard concludes that conceptual art's trump card- the so-called ‘dematerialization’ of the art object- ultimately had little or no impact upon the prevalent commodification of art.3 The liberation of artist and public alike from the managerial prerogatives of critics, curators, collectors and their respective institutions seemed to have been delayed indefinitely.