represent

What we talk about when we talk about Sol LeWitt

Very funny from Hyperallergic. A sample:

LeWitt’s paintings are clearly about making . . . anyone can make a Sol LeWitt painting. It might suck, mind you, but it’s still a LeWitt if it follows the instructions.

LeWitt’s conceptual approach is one of collaboration and is all about erasing, not only art as an object, but also the author himself. Because of this radical turn, one can say that he is seen as one of the most important artists in the conceptual art movement.

In fact, one should say that. You can usually get away with making a claim about who is “seen as” “one of” the most “important” anything — since these qualified phrases exempt you from having stated any facts. When a speaker says that X is seen as one of the most pivotal yadda, they actually mean to say something like, “Woohoo! I love this artist!”

However, in the case of Sol LeWitt, you can genuinely see that he paved the way for a whole new way of talking about art in terms of the concepts called up by viewing and or making it.

In fact, LeWitt’s new lexicon opened floodgates to a vast realm, a Pandora’s Box, one might say, of artworks that needn’t even be realized in order to be appreciated, and even bought and sold.