“SIGNIFICANT ART IS ABOUT IDEAS.”
“SIGNIFICANT ART IS ABOUT IDEAS.” Schwartz thinks that Baudelaire’s “belief that significant art is about ideas, not techniques or matters of form, comes alive again in Schjeldahl’s criticism.” Schwartz quotes Schjeldahl as calling Minimalism “the dominant idea in art of the past forty years.” Apparently art is to be viewed as a search for big ideas. Schjeldahl seems to regret that “we may never get past Minimalism, in the sense of developing a new big idea of what art can and should do in the world.”
I love to answer rhetorical questions. At heart I’m an intellectual fascist. Real art makes people notice something, illuminates something, and makes the focal point accessible for people to internalize as a new experience that adjusts their view point on other experiences.