Conceptual art and the loss of painting

This confusion must prioritise the cognitive. As soon as we read the words on the work or in the didactic we move to the realm of ideas and this necessarily occludes the visual. Have we seen a work of art and had an immediate response or have we read a pamphlet or a tract?

This is perhaps why art that contains text or requires an extended didactic to explain the artist's intentions is always second rate, indeed exists only as a backdrop to the ideas expressed. Art becomes a page on which words are written and as such is insignificant.

I have seen people huddled around such works trying no doubt to find out what is going on. They may be enriched by new ideas and that can be a good thing. However, as with all ideas or concepts once they are in your head the piece of "art" that inspired them ceases to be important. Like a book one has read it may be placed on the bookshelf and forgotten.

This does not bode well for art collectors who like their art to have legs, to continuously fill them with delight year after year. Great art keeps on giving because it is complex and delves deeply into human experience. That is why people go back to see the same picture many times.

Certainly literature can be re-read with an increase in pleasure as the text becomes familiar. But writing on a painting or on a didactic is not great literature. It is not literature at all; it is an instruction.

Goya transmitted meaning in his painting as he pointed to the cruelty of Napoleon's soldiers and the despair of the victims. Where are the painters of today who could produce a work of such power and ingenuity? They are very few and when they do produce works of power they are dismissed under the rubric of neoism. We can't go back, we can't stand still, we must progress. This is the slogan of so called contemporary art.

But progress in painting has run its course. Painting at the end of the twentieth century was in a diminished and exhausted state after all of the new tricks had been played; they have been played out. There were artists like Lucian Freud, who ignored all of the fashionable new movements and doggedly painted human flesh in the most exquisite way. But he is a rarity.