[photo: r. maplethorpe]
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The function of art, as a question, was first raised by Marcel Duchamp. In fact it is Marcel Duchamp we can credit with giving art its own identity. [One can certainly see a tendency toward this self-identification of art beginning with Manet and Cezanne through to Cubism, but their works are timid and ambiguous by comparison with Duchamp's.]
"Modern" art and the work before seemed connected by virtue of their morphology. Another way of putting it would be that art's "language" remained the same, but it was saying new things. The event that made conceivable the realization that it was possible to "speak another language" and still make sense in art was Marcel Duchamp's first unassisted ready-made. With the unassisted readymade, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function.
This change - one from "appearance" to "conception" - was the beginning of "modern" art and the beginning of "conceptual" art. All art [after Duchamp] is conceptual [in nature] because art only exists conceptually.
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