language to supply the information. In this series, Kosuth pays homage to the abstract expressionist painter Ad Reinhardt in reference to a statement made by him that ”art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else”.3 In this statement, Reinhardt is making the argument that art is only art if it is intended to be art, and that everything is else is not art. This goes hand in hand with Marcel Duchamp’s unassisted readymades, a term he used to describe the mass-produced objects he chose to designate as art, such as his bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, or his infamous men’s urinal signed R. Mutt. With the readymade, Duchamp changed the focus from the form of the language to what was being said, and caused many to question the nature of art as well as the uniqueness of the art object. Conceptual art, in its’ broadest sense, was a complete negation of formalist modernism and in the wake of the rapidly changing, socio-economic and political environment of the 1960’s, successive and overlapping revolts from Pop Art to Post-Minimalism began to shape and redefine art as vehicle for ideas in what is known today as Conceptual Art. What follows is an attempt to chronologically re-examine the history of Conceptual Art from its immediate pre-history to the post-conceptualism that followed, and in doing so, this essay hopes to forge a clear understanding of the fundamental ideologies and critical issues of the movement as well as the significant impact it has had in the world of contemporary art.

In the mid-1950’s, artists began to shift their attention from the existential non-figurative paintings of Abstract Expressionism, which was at the forefront of formalist modernism, to an interest in the ordinary, and a use of subject matter derived from the everyday world. These impulses, which can clearly be seen in works such as “Bed” by Robert Rauschenberg (1955), and “Flag” by Jasper Johns (1954-55), led art towards the development of a movement referred to as Pop Art. The English Critic, Lawrence Alloway, first used the term ‘Pop Art’ in a 1958 issue of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings that, “celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worship the god of materialism.” 4 The 1950’s were a period of optimism in America. Consumer production of goods were in rabid surplus, and with the advent of the television popping up in every home in America, the advertising industry began to shape and re-define the culture of the 1960’s. In a significant departure from the emotionally charged styles of the abstract expressionists, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Claes Oldenberg, and James Rosenquist, began to share a new sense of the visual in a mass-consumerism society. In a symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, one of the contributors, critic Henry Geldzahler commented, “The Popular press, especially and most typically Life magazine, the movie close-up, black and white, Technicolour and wide screen, the billboard, extravaganzas, and finally the introduction, through television, of this blatant appeal to our eye into the home – all this has made available to our society, and thus to the artist, an imagery so pervasive, persistent and compulsive that it had to be noticed”. The media & advertising were favorite subjects for Pop Artists, and often served as witty, even satirical celebrations of consumer society. Lichtenstein for example, chose individual frames from emotionally exaggerated cartoon strips and mechanically reproduced them, altering them slightly as needed, on a large-scale oil canvas. It is evident in a painting such as, “I Know how you must feel, Brad” (1963), that the emphasis on the flat and frontal presentation of this emotionally exaggerated cartoon mak

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