What is art? Must it be a unique, saleable luxury item? Can it be a concept that never takes material form? Or an idea for a work that can be repeated endlessly?

Conceptual art favours a vivid engagement with such questions. It can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, in particular, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written the first ever clear, extensive, concise and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon.

What is art? Must it be a unique, saleable luxury item? Can it be a concept that never takes material form? Or an idea for a work that can be repeated endlessly?

Conceptual art favours a vivid engagement with such questions. It can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, in particular, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written the first ever clear, extensive, concise and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon.

An excellent book, though a large part of my feeling that it is excellent can be attributed to Godfrey having more or less my feelings about so many things. I like that he's not afraid to make critical comments. I particularly like that he's not afraid to make critical comments about things I don't like: art that is just about art but acts as if it were about something far more important (e.g., if you're protesting against a museum for not giving artists more control over museums, you might like to consider that nobody gives a shit, and that, e.g., climate change is a more worthy target of protest; this is not to say that you shouldn't protest against the museum. Just don't act like you're doing something other than trying to push your own very particular interests).

That said, I'm sure even fans of Fluxus and (though I can't imagine such people exist) the YBAs will learn a lot from Godfrey. Also, it's very well written.

My minor cavil is that, although the book is kind of sort of marketed as a 'world' history, it really isn't. I don't know how much this has to do with definitions of conceptual art excluding (not in a moralising way) African and Asian artists (potentially a lot), and how much it has to do with conceptual art really just being the preoccupation of a small number of rich American/Europeans. ( )

Covering the entire 20th century, this text traces the roots of conceptual art to movements such as Dada, explaining its importance in the 1960s and 1970s and showing that it is still alive today. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp signed the name R. Mutt on a urinal and placed it in a gallery. Even the most strident modernists refused to accept this object as a work of art, however, Duchamp stuck to his guns, claiming that he had chosen the urinal as an art object so it must be art. Such arguments over the nature of art still continue today. Tony Godfrey sees the archetypal work of Conceptual Art as a question and a proposition joined together: "What is Art? This could be Art." This text seeks to demystify the subject by placing the art in its social and political context.