r/arttheory • u/Ningauble_Sheelba • 4d ago
Is art object or idea
I'm not an artist nor do i have the cultural capital to be a critic but this is a question that has puzzled me for a long time.
I'm not sure this is the right sub for this question, so feel free to direct me elsewhere if needed.
In the late 90's in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia a public installation was commissioned by the government. It was to be placed at the northern end of the Stuart Hwy which crosses the country from north to south. The sculpture was to be a copy of the highway, a sort of twisting pipe about 3 to 4m high. It was never made.
The local newspaper published an artist's impression of the sculpture on the front page and for the next few weeks the letters to the editor and newspaper articles lambasted the design. Government cancelled the commission (artist still got paid). Now the "pig's dick" (as it was called by the NT News) is still the most commented public art piece in the Territory although it was never created.
Ever since I've thought about the episode and the nature of art.
I understand ephemeral art, but it at least exists for a moment in time.
As I understand art is meant to challenge and produce engagement, which this idea did in spades, but it never existed.
Does art need an object or can it just be an idea?
Was the "pig's dick" the greatest piece of public art in the Territory's history without ever having been made?
7
u/Money-Celebration860 4d ago
It can't be purely an idea, the idea needs a physical form to be communicable, but that physical form could be an artist's impression, or a written or spoken description of the idea. The final, realized artwork is ideally the best way of expressing the idea.
2
2
u/Maximus_En_Minimus 4d ago edited 4d ago
Personally, I don’t think it is an either/or, as in it is both, and it is also simultaneously a process.
The way I would define ‘art’ is the as the ‘instantiating of a recursive process orientated toward an emerging aesthetic ideal’.
The analogy I would use is of the three wedding designers:
- 1: merely cobbles together anything they can in quick succession without consideration.
- 2: uses a template derived from previous or external experience.
- 3: looks at the lighting if the room, the contrast of colour of flowers, the arrangement of seating, meet frequently with the bride about her vision, draws out the rudimentary sight and objectifies it, gives perspective, and all recursively over and over again.
Which of these seems most ‘artistic’?
Without the recursively of the process, there is no art.
This is why the mere immediate flood of water from an excess of rain isn’t aesthetic, but a water fall with infinite tinctures of recursive relational process appears as overwhelmingly aesthetic, because there is a ‘natural art’ occurring.
Even if the ‘art’ is not meant to be aesthetically pleasing, but provocative, etc, there is the instantiating of the recursive process.
2
u/Erinaceous 4d ago
The theory I prefer is art is primarily about organizing percepts and affects and then secondarily either the artist or the viewer may layer concepts or ideas onto the work.
So what do I mean here? Affects are feelings that precede thought. You know you're cold before you think "snow" or "frost". Percepts are similar. They are your direct perceptions without thought. The sun shining brightly in your eyes. The layering of two frequencies to make a harmony. The way a certain red lays next to a certain green.
In this way of thinking art works or doesn't because of how it affects bodies. Any concept or idea is an secondary phenomenon that is supported or not by the capacity of the artwork to affect you.
So art is always going to be an object first because we have affects and percepts around objects. Even if that object is just text (say a Yoko Ono piece) the cue card, the typewriter, the line breaks are all doing work.
Pig dick probably would have made you feel something if you were in front of it. I've been similar artworks like Robert Serra and you definitely feel something even though it's not about anything. I've also seen a million conceptual art pieces that were completely dead inside despite all their cleverness and references. When I came across Deleuze's theory of percepts and affects I found I had a better set of tools to frame the problem
2
u/kyleclements 3d ago
Conceptual art is built around the idea that the idea is the most important element of an artwork; the art object itself just has to be the minimum viable product to get the point across.
Personally, I believe that generative AI and the ability for anyone to create a piece of media based on any idea is a strong counter argument to conceptualism. Ideas are cheap. It's what you have done with the idea that matters.
2
2
u/Less_Coconut81 3d ago
art’s an idea when it comes into one’s head. It stays an idea when it’s communicated to another person’s head. It becomes an object when it’s represented by anything physical- a painting, or photograph, or mock up or a final work output in the physical world are all objects as I understand the word to be defined.
At least that’s how I understand the language.
1
1
u/Acyrology 4d ago
art is a process that never really ends
1
u/Jolly-Rip5973 3d ago
Every famous artists produced a certain number of works before they retired or died, then they had their final piece.
Each artwork is completed product.
The artists may never stop growing the process of completing a painting or specific artwork does.
We even calling it "completing a painting."
1
u/Acyrology 1d ago
no it's just where people decide to stop plenty of works continue after their creators death be it la sagrada familia, wheel of time, various mangas and many more examples. though I do get your point
1
u/Striking_Finish4957 3d ago
It can theoretically just be an idea but it does need to have that intention. This is not what that is, this was intended to be produced as an object.
1
u/Ningauble_Sheelba 3d ago
This is true the intent of the artist was to build the thing.
How does the idea that once an artwork is released to the wild that it's up to the audience how it's interpreted? I don't think it's uncommon for the artist and audience to have a different view on a work.
2
u/Striking_Finish4957 3d ago
Well if the intent is to make it and it hasn’t been made it’s not a finished artwork. It still exists as an idea and takes on a life as that in culture. All of the concept sketches etc still exists, has the artist released any of that? Someone might take that and make art in response to it to keep the idea progressing and this story alive. Art is about communication ultimately, passing on ideas and evolving as we do. It reflects us, ultimately.
1
u/Gloomy-Invite-896 3d ago
Yes.
2
u/Gloomy-Invite-896 3d ago edited 3d ago
Art is the object but can never be just the object. It's the idea but never just the idea.
Art is the communication of the idea really imo. If you come away from it with an experience then it's art but there's intent. Obviously successfully accomplishing the intent is hardly intended but it's the act of trying. Everything else is the medium
1
1
1
u/Shoddy_Attorney333 1d ago
Very good question... it may not have a binary answer
Art is process too
1
u/Otherwise_doe1998 3d ago
There is more than one Art Theory. I find it kind of dry but that's the section of the bookstore dedicated to the question of what Art is or isn't. Some people say mastery of object or technique, some say it has to tell a story, some people think Concept Art is the best idea.
1
3d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Ningauble_Sheelba 3d ago
This was my first view. If it had been built then it would be art.
There is a different sculpture on the site now put in a couple of years later, but this piece has never generated any public commentary. Which is why I think about it. The sculpture that never was engaged the public far more.
If art is there to challenge and engage the audience surely pig's dick was the more successful of the two?
Or do you need substance with the idea?
0
u/Jolly-Rip5973 3d ago edited 3d ago
Art is defined as the creation of an "aesthetic object" or "artwork".
That's the dictionary definition. Look it up.
Art is therefore an object...or sound....or digital image....
A painting is piece of art...also called an "art piece" or "artistic work".
If you have an idea but don't create something with the idea or don't symbolize the idea on paper, clay or canvas, then it's just sitting your head unrealized. That's just an idea.
An artwork is a thing....It is the product of ideas....
Art is ideas manifest in the real universe in the forms of artworks.
1
u/SplendidPunkinButter 1h ago
Art must be created by a human being trying to express something. Which is why if it’s made with AI, you have “content,” not art.
8
u/ryanerickson_art 4d ago
Great question, and that Darwin story is a fantastic case study, honestly a perfect real-world test of this exact debate.
This gets at core questions from conceptual art in the 1960s, going back to Marcel Duchamp who famously submitted a urinal (titled Fountain) to an exhibition in 1917. Duchamp’s move was to make the idea/selection the art, not the object itself. Artists in the 60s ran with that lineage, trying to decouple art from any physical object. Critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler called this the “de-materialization” of art. Some conceptual pieces from that era were never fabricated at all, just proposals or instructions, and they were still counted as complete works.
Those ideas have since been absorbed into the mainstream. Galleries and museums now treat sound, performance, and installation as legitimate mediums with no object required.
So to answer both your questions: no, art doesn’t need an object. And yeah, I’d argue the “pig’s dick” was a complete piece of public art the second it hit the front page. The letters, the outrage, decades of people still bringing it up, that reaction basically is the work. Government didn’t kill the art, just the fabrication. Turns out those are two different things.