I read about an exhibit that has just opened at the Dorsky Museum on the campus of SUNY New Paltz and the comments the artist made struck a chord:
Marco Maggi said that he, for one, does not believe nor will his audience believe that “art is only about ideas — that there is some hidden, complex idea that is so intellectual that few can understand it. No, not at all.”
“The main issue in this show is surfaces. Our surfaces, how superficial they are. I hope, if anything that I can help encourage people to look, give a second glance…"
As an apologist for the beauty of physicality and it's primacy over, or at least congruent to "conceptual art", I enjoy when artists disavow or give secondary status to the intellectual component of their art.
At the end of the day the question one has to answer is "Does the art have heart?"
