by Ben Spatz
It's not that conceptual art isn't art, it's just that it's less art. Separate from the quality of any given artistic choice, is the quantity of choices made in a given work. Many pieces of conceptual art are basically just one choice, so in some sense there is very little art in them. Of course, if that one choice is brilliant, the chooser could be a great artist. An inventor who creates only one thing, if that one thing revolutionizes the world, is at least as great as an inventor who creates a lot of things which are not that great, although the former has in some sense *done* less.
One of the things I care about in art, though, is multiplicity of levels of signification. A writer signifies on the level of the novel, but also on the level of the paragraph and sentence, right down to word choice. Each of these levels requires artistic choice. Synthesizing them in a way that works is the genius of the artist, and requires millions of choices. The same is true of a painter like my mom, who makes grand choices about the piece but also makes thousands of tiny choices about each brush stroke, orchestrating everything. A conceptual artist who lights trees from below is not signifying on multiple levels, even though trees are just as complex as books or more so. This is because the complexity of the tree is an expression of nature, not of the artist. The artist makes no choices about the design of the tree. Therefore the network of branches does not *signify* and is not art. So the tree-lighting artist is only making one choice, although their work does exist on multiple levels. The same is true of an artist who makes a cast of the human body. They make a few choices about how to cast the body, but the infinite complexity of the human body is not an artistic choice.
There is a deep theoretical question here about intention. Is my mom's work infinitely signifying? No, because some portion of the brushwork happens by accident. It is only that which she intends which signifies and which counts as art. But of course, the line between accidental physical activity and intended brain activity is unclear. It exists in the brain, between intended and unintended thought. And that distinction is kind of dubious. But regardless of that, I think it's clear that a painting with one line on it is *less* art than a painting with thousands of lines--even if in this case less is more.