It only seems natural that someone raised in Los Angeles, but an émigré in New Zealand, should challenge the concluding shibboleth of the New York art market. New York has been tangibly losing altitude since mid-20^th century. Los Angeles proposes itself as the viable alternative, pushing its candidacy with aggressive multi-billion dollar museums and acquisitions. But Los Angeles feels like a New York creation – a conceptual arts performance built on sand and imported water. New Zealand, as peripheral in our field of awareness, yields a wistful fragrance of sophistication and nature, an appropriate source for a contemporary romanticism.

            And, of course, anyone with the temerity to attack New York – particularly the New York art market – must be a romantic: distracted, if not deluded.

            Conceptualism has been the abrading basis of modernism in the arts from the beginning. The 20^th century understanding of abstraction necessarily eventuates in conceptualism. Granted that art, by nature, is abstract, the abstract has only become formal concept during the past century.

            But conceptualism is a cultural disease, not simply a disease of the arts. The visual arts perhaps most tangibly express the progressive formalization of the concept, the extending rigidity that denatures the creative act itself. What claims to be the latest, the epitome of the new, finally becomes the obvious sign of senescence.

            But it is not simply the senescence of place, the degeneration of a given locale – a characteristic of aesthetic history. In many ways, New York has always been the expression of an idea. The conversion from the indefinite to the definite is indigenous in the nature of the city. New York has always embodied the idea – that is, the idea as commodity.

            The concept is the final paradox that unseats academic philosophy as it is practiced today. When we reduce philosophy to the ‘verifiable’, concept becomes the necessary pivot that cannot be verified by our present strictures.

            Perhaps we can deny awareness, assigning it to some region of the nebulous, without losing the nature of analysis. But if we cannot verify concept, analysis itself falls into the abyss of probabilities and skepticism.

            Paradoxically, this is the basis of the exclusivity of concept, of its elevation to the status of the dominant cultural god. Concept becomes a commodity, a transactional given. We cannot locate its source. We cannot certify its existence in any other terms than the ‘fact’ of its existence – even if it finally stands outside our definition of ‘fact’.

            But, as the essential transactional commodity, it is the only ‘entity’ we need. It not only stands in place of consciousness and unity, it becomes the de facto corollary of the ‘matter’ of ‘materialism’, even if any strict definition of ‘matter’ is precisely what precludes us from registering concept as ‘fact’. To have matter, we must have a tacit rubric for unity, something that matter itself, as presently defined, cannot supply.

            That is, concept becomes the living embodiment of dead fact, a philosophical impossibility but a transactional necessity.

            And it is precisely this self-excluding concept which has become the diminishing point toward which the arts now stand in asymptotic approach.