In his intellectually stimulating book, philosopher Peter Osborne embarks on a profound exploration of contemporary visual art, offering a compelling philosophical framework for understanding its unique characteristics and challenges. Osborne posits that contemporary art exists in a “post-conceptual condition,” a state born from significant shifts in the art world, and argues for a “critical philosophy” as the most insightful approach to engage with it. This essay delves into the core arguments of Osborne’s work, examining his analysis of contemporary art’s ontology, its relationship to modernism, and the critical tools he proposes for its interpretation.
Osborne’s central thesis revolves around the idea that contemporary art has moved beyond the era of conceptualism, not by rejecting it, but by absorbing and transcending its fundamental principles. He identifies three pivotal developments that have shaped this post-conceptual condition: the widespread acceptance of unconventional materials in art, the embrace of conceptualism’s notion of art as the embodiment of an idea, and the resulting “transcategorial” nature of contemporary artworks. This transcategoriality signifies a blurring of traditional boundaries between mediums and disciplines, leading to artworks that often integrate diverse elements unified by a central concept.
This shift, according to Osborne, presents both opportunities and challenges. While it liberates artistic practice from traditional constraints, it also creates a risk of succumbing to “conformism” – a tendency to interpret contemporary art through the lens of outdated categories like painting and sculpture, merely “suitably expanded.” Osborne advocates for a “critical” philosophy of contemporary art that resists this conformist pressure and engages with artworks on their own terms, acknowledging their distinctiveness and contemporaneity. This critical approach, inspired by the post-Kantian European tradition and thinkers like Theodor Adorno, prioritizes a deep engagement with a select number of “paradigmatic” artworks that embody the defining features of contemporary art.
Osborne’s methodology is not about providing a comprehensive survey of contemporary art’s vast landscape. Instead, he adopts a focused approach, akin to Adorno’s, concentrating on works that grapple with the most pressing demands of our time, reflecting the complexities of contemporary life. This leads to a crucial question for Osborne: what distinguishes contemporary art from modern and pre-modern art forms? He argues that understanding contemporary art requires a dialectical inquiry, where the general characteristics of contemporary art are revealed through the analysis of specific, paradigmatic works, and vice versa. The distinctiveness of contemporary art becomes discernible through its most exemplary manifestations.
For Osborne, the conceptual art movement of the late 1960s, particularly the work of Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, marks a watershed moment in art history, paving the way for contemporary art. Conceptual art championed the primacy of the “idea” governing an artwork over its material form. This idea, Osborne explains, need not be confined to a specific medium, and its artistic significance surpasses any particular embodiment. While the aesthetic dimension – the perceptible qualities of an artwork – remains, conceptual art, in its purest form, sought to minimize or even eliminate it, becoming a “non-aesthetic” and even “anti-aesthetic” art form.
Although conceptual art as a movement was short-lived, Osborne argues that it fundamentally altered the ontology of artworks. It severed the previously assumed link between art and aesthetics. Contemporary art, while re-embracing aesthetics, retains the conceptual legacy. Conceptuality becomes a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for contemporary art. The “sufficient conditions” are found in the diverse use of materials within the expanded field of artistic practice characteristic of our time.
A significant portion of Osborne’s analysis is dedicated to differentiating between “conformist” and “critical” interpretations of contemporary art’s materiality. He vehemently opposes viewing post-conceptual art merely as an extension of traditional genres. Such interpretations, he believes, fail to grasp the radical discontinuity that defines contemporary art. Osborne emphasizes the “crisis of mediations” as a key phenomenon. This crisis arises from a long-term social transformation that champions individual freedom and expression, reflected in art’s perceived role as a vehicle for this freedom. However, Osborne cautions, “absolute individuation destroys meaning.” For art to be intelligible and achieve “social objectivity,” categories or “mediations” are essential. The categories of contemporary art, therefore, become “mediations of the crisis of mediation.”
Osborne uses “mediation” as a broad term encompassing categories used to classify and understand art, including period, style, genre, and medium. For modern and contemporary art, the critical and productive use of these mediations becomes a central issue. “Period,” being the most general mediation (e.g., modern art, contemporary art), sets the stage for understanding more specific mediations. Osborne argues that each period embodies a distinct concept of artistic unity. He highlights the prevalence of artworks presented as a “series” in contemporary art, drawing a parallel to philosophical Romanticism, where the work is seen as a fragment of an infinite project reflecting the artist’s evolving self-awareness.
Thus, Osborne characterizes critical contemporary art as a post-conceptual art of series and fleeting categorizations. He reinforces this account by contrasting it with “medium-specificity,” a concept associated with Clement Greenberg and later figures like Michael Fried and Jeff Wall. He also examines Robert Smithson’s “site/non-site” dialectic and analyzes contemporary works addressing themes of displacement and memory.
Osborne critiques “medium-specific modernism” for “ontologizing” mediums, suggesting each medium expresses an “irreducible element of experience.” This approach, he argues, hinders the development of a “generic conception” of contemporary art, where artworks are primarily categorized as “art” rather than as instances of a specific medium. He believes medium-specificity obstructs the critical potential of art to reflect on its social conditions. Jeff Wall’s photographic work, in Osborne’s view, risks conformism by aligning itself with painting traditions.
Robert Smithson’s work, according to Osborne, provides a crucial counterpoint to conformist interpretations. Smithson’s “site/non-site” concept involves taking materials from a “site” and exhibiting them in a “non-site,” creating a semantic relationship between the two. This process can be further iterated, generating a potentially infinite chain of sites and non-sites. Osborne argues that understanding Smithson’s work solely as sculpture or through an “academic formalism” misses its broader conceptual scope. For Osborne, Smithson’s concept exemplifies the ineliminable yet insufficient role of conceptuality in contemporary art.
Finally, Osborne analyzes recent artworks that engage with memory and place, often utilizing video and multi-sensory elements. He distinguishes between “conformist” works that merely recreate sites of memory and more “critical” works that utilize video, split screens, and rhythmic sounds to tap into a “somatic, pre-symbolic level of memory.” These critical works, he argues, construct history by staging the tension between memory and historical experience, subjecting memories to artistic form rather than simply representing them.
Osborne also emphasizes the philosophical dimension of engaging with contemporary art. He argues that conceptualizing contemporary art inherently involves projecting its future, as it is an ongoing and evolving phenomenon. He draws an analogy to Benedict Anderson’s concept of the “nation” as an imagined community, suggesting that understanding contemporary art requires constructing “models” to grasp its underlying structures and forces, echoing Adorno and Weber’s methodologies.
Osborne’s reliance on Adornian thought brings with it certain challenges. His use of Hegelian terminology, such as “mediation,” “reflection,” and “determinate negation,” without explicit definitions, can be demanding for readers. While Adorno allowed meaning to emerge through usage, Osborne similarly seems to expect clarity to arise from the application of these terms in analyzing contemporary art. However, the meaning of these terms, especially in distinguishing between conformist and critical approaches, remains a point of contention.
For instance, the concept of “determinate negation” becomes complex when considering artists like Manet or Picasso, whose work could be interpreted as a negation of previous artistic conventions. Similarly, minimalist artists like Donald Judd or conceptual artists further complicate the picture. Osborne focuses on the “more thoroughgoing negations” of conceptual art, but distinguishing determinate negation from simply changing artistic direction becomes problematic without clearer criteria. A Hegelian understanding suggests determinate negation preserves what is negated, but in Osborne’s account, the role of negated artistic mediations in contemporary art seems limited to providing material vehicles for artistic ideas, with little preservation of the medium’s inherent qualities or historical significance.
Furthermore, Osborne’s analysis of exemplary “critical” works, particularly his emphasis on rhythmic and somatic responses, introduces elements not explicitly accounted for in his framework of mediations. This raises questions about whether the framework needs to be expanded to incorporate these dimensions. The challenge lies in integrating these phenomena without blurring the distinction between conformist and critical art, as somatic responses might be present in both.
The fundamental distinction between conformist and critical art itself remains somewhat elusive in Osborne’s account. He treats them as mutually exclusive categories with distinct canons, terminologies, and criteria. However, an alternative perspective might view the distinction as one of degree, between less and more rigorous approaches to artistic achievement. Drawing on the Frankfurt School’s distinction between traditional and critical theory, one might argue that critical art encompasses the concerns of conformist art but adds a critical dimension, reflecting on its own conditions of production and reception.
Finally, the selective adoption of Adornian thought raises concerns. Adorno’s complex and often contradictory body of work resists easy systematization. A central theme in Adorno’s aesthetics is the inherent “tendency towards affirmation” in artworks, which clashes with the negativity and self-undermining required for art to critically engage with a flawed modern world. This nuanced understanding of success and failure in art seems absent in Osborne’s more binary categorization of critical works as successes and conformist works as failures.
Despite these complexities and potential ambiguities, Peter Osborne’s book represents a significant contribution to the philosophy of art. It is a pioneering work in English that brings contemporary art into the realm of serious philosophical inquiry, moving beyond the traditional focus on conceptual art’s puzzles. Osborne’s work is particularly valuable for highlighting the challenges of evaluating contemporary art given the “crisis of mediations” and the fluidity of artistic categories. While further exploration is needed, Osborne’s analysis provides a crucial starting point for future discussions on the philosophy of contemporary art.
REFERENCES
Flam, Jack (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996), University of California Press.
Geuss, Raymond, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981), Cambridge University Press.
— Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (1999), Cambridge University Press.
Honneth, Axel, Pathologies of Reason (2009), Columbia University Press.
Rosen, Michael, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (1985), Cambridge University Press.
Shelley, James, “The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics (2003) 43 (4), pp. 363-378.
