The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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Figure. 5. Detail of The Map Precedes the Territory: Live Satellite Feed from Iraq.
Photograph by Monika Lozinska-Lee
Figure. 6. Detail of The Map Precedes the Territory: Live Satellite Feed from Iraq.
Monika Lozinska-Lee
The Concept of the Concept
Concepts themselves are tricky things. The history of philosophy is in
many ways the history of our struggle to understand concepts. Plato, of course,
considered concepts to be so important that he argued that they have more
reality than our own physical world. “Tree,” that is, is far more real than any tree
we have ever seen. And so are “Freedom,” “Beauty,” “Love,” and all other
universals. These Ideals live in the Realm of the Forms, the Realm of Being,
while we are trapped in the world of particulars, the Realm of Becoming. All of
the actual trees we experience are shadows of the more perfect “Tree.” For this
reason, in part, Plato banished artists from his proposed utopia. A painting of a
tree is a shadow of a physical tree, a shadow of a shadow, and thus even further
removed from the true reality, the true Form, the true concept.
Immanuel Kant considered the search for a priori concepts—concepts
that we have in our minds before we experience anything in the world, concepts
that thus did not arise from experience and abstraction but are built into
conscious thought as the transcendental possibility of thought itself—to be the