Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

118 OCTOBER
to the manifest lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction,
all the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment--of taste and of
connoisseurship - have been programmatically voided. The result of this is that
the definition of the aesthetic becomes on the one hand a matter of linguistic
convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and an
institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste).
This erosion works, then, not just against the hegemony of the visual, but
against the possibility of any other aspect of the aesthetic experience as being
autonomous and self-sufficient. That the introduction of legalistic language and
an administrative style of the material presentation of the artistic object could
effect such an erosion had of course been prefigured in Duchamp's practice as
well. In 1944 he had hired a notary to inscribe a statement of authenticity on his
1919 L.H.O.O.Q., affirming that ". . . this is to certify that this is the original
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Robert Morris. Untitled (Statement of Aesthetic
Withdrawal). 1963.
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