Conceptual art transformed the art world beginning in the 1960s by shifting the focus of the work from the art object itself to the ideas and concepts that went into its creation. Such works rose to prominence as a reaction to Western formalist art and to the art writings of Clement Greenberg, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell, theorists who championed the significance of form and modernism. Not far removed from the ideas of the Dadist movement of the early twentieth century and artist Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, conceptualism insists that ideas, and the implementations of them, become the art itself; often there is an absence of an actual object. Conceptual art worked in the spirit of postmodernism that pervaded post-1960s American culture.

Joseph Kosuth, one of the primary participants and founders of the conceptual art movement, first formulated the ideas of the movement in his writings...