‘The aim of Dada was to destroy Dada’ Although I am a firm believer in critically analysing what constitutes ‘art’, a recent trip to a Brisbane art gallery truly highlighted the extent of my scepticism towards Conceptualism. On walking into the gallery, I was introduced to a series of paintings, one of which appeared to be a black spot on top of a white canvas. However, the curators were quick to point out how misguided I was: as the title suggested, it was obviously a bishop’s hat, and was apparently more meaningful than I had thought. This was followed by the artist’s piece Angels Descend; here, I was instructed to watch the canvas for a few minutes, when apparently things would begin to ‘appear’. Perhaps it was the absence of a discerning and critical eye, or the experience of having just witnessed Bishop’s Hat, but the only thing that did become apparent to me that day was that a drip of paint on canvas was now classified as gallery-worthy material. When I questioned how genuine these two artworks were, my criticism was instantly shot down with the same retort I had heard many times before—the infallible ‘you don’t understand it’ and ‘you have too little experience in the art world to know’. In truth, I was not sure if this particular encounter with the art world made me want to know more, as it appeared that art was now available only to the elite—the art sphere’s most well respected and famous members. Apparently, they had some kind of supernatural vision. In the 1900s, Conceptual Art, which originated from Dadaism,1 was neither contrived nor a concept that the art world had... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline