They sold "thin air" for big bucks

 

"One and Three Chairs" is an iconic piece of conceptual art, created in 1965 by the American artist Joseph Kosuth. The installation challenges the audience to reflect on the nature of art and representation, exploring the relationship between a physical object and its meaning. The work forces you to compare three ways of describing reality: the real object (experience), the photograph (image), and the text (language).

In his book The Republic (Book X), Plato uses the metaphor of the three beds to explain this exact point: words and images are not the things themselves.

The philosopher's idea was that three levels of reality exist in the world: the perfect concept, which exists only in the world of ideas; the real object (made of wood, built by a carpenter; the carpenter copies the general idea of a bed); and the representation (the painting of a bed), which is merely a copy of the physical object—hence, a copy of a copy, and therefore the furthest from the truth.

So, the idea that a word is not the thing itself comes from Plato, and the idea of bringing an everyday object into a museum had already been used 50 years earlier by Marcel Duchamp.

Kosuth not only failed to create a work of art, but his idea was not very original either. We could call it "applied philosophy," "institutional critique," or anything else, but not "art."

This was for a reason that was both pragmatic and ideological: in the 1960s, "conceptual artists" wanted to destroy the art market—the expensive objects bought by billionaires. They called their ideas "art" as an act of protest, to prove that museums would exhibit anything with a clever label. Unfortunately/fortunately for them, museums swallowed this protest and turned it into official history.

Instead of making art accessible to people, "conceptual artists" did the exact opposite. They created a "protest" that perfectly suited the very system they claimed to hate:

• They sold "thin air" for big bucks: Museums and wealthy collectors quickly realized that it was much cheaper and more profitable to buy an "idea" or a sketch with instructions from Kosuth, instead of buying a heavy marble sculpture that requires expensive transport and insurance.

• They became elitist: Instead of bringing art closer to the common man, they turned it into an even more exclusive club. The average person entering the museum felt excluded or tricked, while a handful of snobbish critics bragged that they "understood" the concept behind the chair.

Their protest was not a generous one aimed at the people; it was an intellectual game that, in the end, was completely bought out and absorbed by the luxury art market. Joseph Kosuth wanted—or claimed he wanted—to strike a blow against the system, but it turned out that the instructions for his work ended up being sold for huge sums of money.

👁️ The Ideological Reason: Destroying the System
At the level of ideas, conceptual artists of the 1960s had clear political and social intentions, influenced by the leftist movements of the time:

• The fight against money: They hated that art had become a luxury commodity for billionaires.

• The attack on museums: They wanted to prove that museums were just "banks" keeping expensive objects, not places of the spirit.

• Democratization through the mind: Their thinking was that if art is just an idea, then anyone with a mind can own or make art, without needing money for expensive materials.

💰 The Pragmatic Reason: Survival and Success
Despite their idealistic discourse, these artists had to live, pay rent, and become known. Their pragmatism showed in the way they managed the system:

• A new market for "nothing": The artists realized that the traditional art market (painting) was already full and controlled by the older generation. To stand out, they had to come up with something completely different.

• Intellectual property: Although they said they hated property, they were very pragmatic. They did not give ideas away for free. They invented "certificates of authenticity." The buyer did not receive an object, but a piece of paper signed by the artist saying they owned the idea. That paper could be sold further.

• University careers: Many conceptual artists (including Kosuth) became professors at major universities. Their job was no longer to create in a studio, but to teach theory, becoming part of the official system they criticized.

🔄 How the Two Reasons Joined Together
Pragmatism saved the ideology from disappearing, but it also compromised it. Conceptual artists understood that to change the rules of the game, they had to play inside it.
They offered institutions exactly what they needed during that period of social change: art that seemed intellectual, rebellious, and cheap to produce, but could be sold just as expensively as an old painting.

Stupidity breeds comical situations:

🧈The block of lard cleaned with detergent (Joseph Beuys, 1986)
The conceptual artist Joseph Beuys left a large block of pork fat in a corner of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which was meant to melt over time.

• What happened: A very conscientious cleaning lady saw the grease stain on the wall and the floor. She scrubbed the area with detergent and a sponge until everything was sparkling clean. The German state was sued by the collector who had bought the "lard" and had to pay huge damages.

👓 The eyeglasses on the floor experiment (2016)
To prove that people in museums accept anything out of snobbery, two teenagers pulled a prank at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They bought a simple pair of eyeglasses and placed them on the floor, next to an empty wall.

• The result: Within just a few minutes, dozens of visitors gathered around the glasses. People took pictures, kept a respectful distance, and seriously discussed the artwork's "profound message" about vision and modern society. When the boys picked the glasses up from the floor and put them on, the visitors realized they had been fooled.

Text written by AI, slightly edited