Conceptual Art, an art form that developed in the mid-1960s, in which the concept takes precedence over the actual object. As American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt notes in a 1969 article, not all ideas for art need to take physical form. Le Witt argued that art criticism is no longer necessary because artists can and should write their own analysis of art; these writings are themselves as legitimate an art form as painting or sculpture. Around the same time, another founder of the conceptual movement, Joseph Kosuth, declared that conceptual art is based on an inquiry into the nature of art itself.

Early conceptual art took several forms. LeWitt provided how-to instructions for creating drawings, specifying types of lines by length, curvature, color, and so forth. The instructions constituted the salable artwork; the drawings themselves were only a secondary result of the original creative concept. In 1965 Kosuth exhibited single objects—a chair, hammer, or saw, for example—alongside a life-size photograph of the object and a dictionary definition of the object printed on a placard. This presentation questioned the relationship between objects, images, and words.

Another investigation of the link between art and language occurs in the work of American artist Lawrence Weiner. By lettering phrases about material conditions like scale, position, color, and even price, directly on gallery walls, Weiner made art out of language. For his No. 051 (1969, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), Weiner had the words “1000 GERMAN MARKS WORTH MEDIUM BULK MATERIAL TRANSFERRED FROM ONE COUNTRY TO ANOTHER” printed on the gallery wall. Weiner instructed that the phrase be presented “alongside the material referred to.” Weiner’s instructions are purposely open-ended, so that in one installation it might include a pile of fabric with a value of 1000 German marks, and in another, a pile of bricks with this value. Then again, in Weiner’s conception, the piece need not be built at all; the words could simply be spoken and the piece imagined. Hanne Darboven, a German conceptualist, has been working with numerical and chronological progressions since 1965, creating serial installations that examine the nature of time. In her Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (1996, Dia Center for the Arts, New York City) 1,589 panels of uniform size and format trace more than a century of history, using texts, numbers, photographs, and postcards.

In practice, many conceptual works were reduced to the documentation of an event or activity through written instructions, photographs, or video footage. Additionally, some conceptual artists executed or gave directions for performance art. A 1970 work by Japanese American performance artist Yoko Ono consisted of the simple written instruction: “Draw an imaginary map and follow it down an actual street.” This piece demonstrates the difficulty of connecting an abstract idea (the imagined place) and a visual representation of it (the map) to the real world (the actual street).

Conceptual art has important precedents in the early 20th century. French American artist Marcel Duchamp exhibited an upside down but otherwise unaltered Bicycle Wheel in 1913, asserting that it and other everyday objects are sculpture if an artist declares them to be so. Duchamp soon followed the bicycle wheel with a bottle rack, snow shovel, and most famously, a urinal. The attitude of Duchamp and other members of the dada movement who shared his revolutionary views about art reemerged in the early 1960s through an international group of artists calling themselves Fluxus. Working under the spiritual guidance of American composer John Cage, Fluxus artists sought to erode the barriers between art and life and allow randomness and chance to guide their work. Another important precedent to conceptual art is minimal art, a movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In minimal art simple geometry often determines the shape of a sculpture or painting, and the mathematical specifications for an artwork can be as important as its execution.

Conceptual artists originally attempted to rid art of all so-called objecthood and thus of its commercial value as well, and their endeavor survived for only a few years in its purest form. But conceptualism’s heirs thrive. In the 1970s a number of artists, including Americans Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and German artist Lothar Baumgarten, began using words in their art to explore visual and verbal conventions. The legacy of conceptual art is a belief that thought expressed in words can be art.