Henry Flynt Coins Concept Art

“’Concept art’ is first of all an art of which the material is ‘concepts.’” -Henry Flynt in “Concept Art” Flynt, an American philosopher, musician and artist, coined the term “concept art” in his 1961 essay “Concept Art”, published in An Anthology in 1963. In the essay, Flynt argues that art should be based on ideas rather than aesthetics. He claims that artists should focus on creating thought-provoking works rather than visually appealing ones, a key tenet of post-modernism. Conceptual art shares generative art’s interest in the process of creation, as the term “concept art” was later adopted by other artists, including Sol LeWitt, a progenitor of material generative practices. In many ways, computer art specifically can be seen as an extension of conceptual art, according to Frank Popper and Grant Taylor. In addition to aesthetic overlap, both movements emphasize the importance of ideas over materials and use can use algorithmic procedure, text, and other non-traditional mediums to convey their ideas. Conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt produced instructions for other humans to carry out. Computer artists like Manfred Mohr produced algorithms for a computer plotter to carry out. This was another hugely important step in the dematerialization of art.