Formulating Abstraction: Conceptual Art and the Architectural Object, by Therese Tierney

What is art? What are artworks?
This article is about the ontology of art and artworks in these days. What are artworks? What sort of entities are artworks? Are they physical objects itself or are they rather creative ideas such as concepts? In the classical art we didn’t need to separate art objects from the ideas. But during the early 20th century the normative vision of the fine art was called into question as a result of numerous advances in methods of representation, first in photography and later in Dadaist film. Furthermore the conceptual art began to make questions about the ontology of artworks and to build a concept that art is not depend on its materialization.

Formulating Abstraction
When we can accept that art is a formulated idea of an abstract representation in our mind then we can also accept that the real affection of artworks doesn’t lie on an object but on the representation. The object plays just a role of medium. This sort of philosophical sift is not only the problem for architecture but for new-media artists. They produce artworks, which can fill no traditional criterion and has just virtual form in digital world.

This ontological crisis of representation is crucial to understanding one of the forms of resistance in architecture toward new forms of media expression.