"A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form"
About this Quote
LeWitt’s line is a quiet manifesto disguised as a commonsense observation. By choosing “a blind man” as his example, he prods at a stubborn art-world reflex: the assumption that visual art is fundamentally about seeing, and that the artist’s authority rests in ocular mastery. He flips that hierarchy. Art, for LeWitt, is not the retinal performance but the successful relay of an idea.
The phrasing matters. “Passed to another mind” frames art as transmission, almost like code, not confession. And “in some tangible form” keeps the claim from floating into pure theory: the idea still has to hit the world, take a shape, create a shared object or procedure. That tension between the immaterial (mind) and the material (form) is where Conceptual art lives, and LeWitt spent his career building systems to make it livable.
Context sharpens the intent. In the late 1960s, LeWitt was arguing for works that could be executed by others from written instructions. His wall drawings, in particular, treat the artist less like a craftsperson and more like an architect of rules. The quote retroactively justifies that delegation: if the core achievement is communicability, then authorship becomes design, not touch.
The subtext is also a rebuke to romantic genius. If art can be made without sight, it can be made without the myth of the solitary virtuoso. What counts is clarity of conception and the ethics of translation: can an internal image survive contact with other people, other hands, a stubbornly physical world?
The phrasing matters. “Passed to another mind” frames art as transmission, almost like code, not confession. And “in some tangible form” keeps the claim from floating into pure theory: the idea still has to hit the world, take a shape, create a shared object or procedure. That tension between the immaterial (mind) and the material (form) is where Conceptual art lives, and LeWitt spent his career building systems to make it livable.
Context sharpens the intent. In the late 1960s, LeWitt was arguing for works that could be executed by others from written instructions. His wall drawings, in particular, treat the artist less like a craftsperson and more like an architect of rules. The quote retroactively justifies that delegation: if the core achievement is communicability, then authorship becomes design, not touch.
The subtext is also a rebuke to romantic genius. If art can be made without sight, it can be made without the myth of the solitary virtuoso. What counts is clarity of conception and the ethics of translation: can an internal image survive contact with other people, other hands, a stubbornly physical world?
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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