How do you feel about the working method of Lewitt, meaning that he dictates the idea/model, but other artists actually create the work?

Question

How do you feel about the working method of Lewitt, meaning that he dictates the idea/model, but other artists actually create the work? If conceptual art challenges artistic conventions, how do you feel Lewitt's work and his working method reflect this?

Answer 1

While many painters (I assume your question refers essentially to painters or what is called the plastic arts when you say "artists," not e.g., writers or musicians) have historically used helpers, normally apprentices, Rubens being the most famous of these, charging commission based on the percentage he personally painted, and artists who used printing methods to produce multiple copies may or may not have operated the machinery of production or signed the end product themselves (again making the work more or less "their" artwork), I believe Lewitt's proposal is absurd. Of course contemporary art and art theory has problems in general (see my artlcle "The End of Art Theory" published in Humanitas, Fall 2002). Conceptual art in general is problematic. For example, I do not think the verbal description of a work that no one has actually created should be called art; nor do I think the Institutional Theory of art is valid--just because something is called by someone or group of someones "art" does not make it so. Ever since Dada, what art is, rather than how it is made or judged has become a problem. Since, on the contemporary art-scene, by one theory or another, anything can be called "art," the term excludes nothing and has therefore become meaningless. Lewitt is just another of these so-called "artists."