I'm always thinking about craft via concept, design via idea, implementation via plan. If the creative process was 100% idea, designers would be out of a job. What a designer does is develop and implement an idea craftily and skillfully, so that the way in which the initial idea is encoded enhances/embodies/enlivens/ substantiates the idea.

The Guardian did an experiment where they placed contemporary artworks by Young British Artists in the homes of "normal" people. They left the artworks there for awhile, and then they interviewed the homeowners to get their reactions.

To me, the experiment, itself, is much more interesting and successful than any of the individual pieces of art used in the experiment. Not surprisingly, most of the homeowners were none too impressed with the artworks. It's easy to dismiss the homeowners as philistine, but I think that's too convenient.

Most people expect there to be some implementation/craft/design involved in art. Indeed, that is the "art" of art. It's not that people necessarily want a physical object—although, perhaps, that's how most people often express their disappointment in extreme concept-centric art ("There's NO THING to it").

I was watching Pulp Fiction, the other night, and it occured to me that—as with Monty Python and the Holy Grail (or "Hamlet", for that matter)—much of the "art" of Pulp Fiction is in the dialogue that occurs 'in between' the 'plot' of the film. The plot is just a vehicle for some quirky dialogue and interesting acting. Indeed, all of Shakespeare's plots were merely recycled from well-known stories of his day. Shakespeare's invention was not in the plots, but in the art/craft of playwriting implementation. Just as Hitchcock's genius was not in plot construction or even script writing (neither of which he did), but in the craft of film directing.

So, the Cliff's Notes to "Merchant of Venice" are by no means "Merchant of Venice", itself. Because the art of that play is not merely in a summary of it, but in the implementation of it. Yet, with so much object-incidental, concept-centric art, all we get are the Cliff's Notes. Cage's "4'33''" or Sherry Levine's "After Walker Evans"—those are Cliff's Notes pieces. I don't need to experience those pieces to 'get them' entirely. The Cliff's Notes explanation of the pieces will wholly suffice.

Note that I'm not dissing pieces like "Printer Tree" or "Listening Post". Both of those pieces, although obviously conceptual, are not merely conceptual. I can read about those projects and see photographs and QuickTime videos of those installation spaces, but until I experience the installations in person, I'm not getting the full effect of the art. There is "art" in the implementation of those concepts.

I don't want to impose rules on what is right and what is wrong concerning the concept <-----> implementation continuum. But I will say that I find art on the extreme 'concept' side of the spectrum particularly flat, pedantic, didactic, and boring. Like reading Cliff's Notes.

Another disadvantage of Cliff's Notes-type art (and this becomes evident in the forementioned Guardian experiment) is that it doesn't wear very well. I'm not going to re-read the Cliff's Notes to "Merchant of Venice" for pleasure. Once I get it, I get it. Which is why highly conceptual 'Cliff's Notes art' works better in a gallery (or in the footnotes of an academic essay) than in one's living environment. In a gallery, you can cruise around, get the punchline, feel enlightened, and leave. But in your home, you have to sit and stare at a half-sheep in formaldahyde, or an unmade bed, or the lights switching on and off, or whatever it is.

When thinking of art, I always fall back on audio production analogies, since that's the art I learned first. Cliff's Notes art is like bubblegum pop music. It's like the Backstreet Boys. Chew it up and spit it out. There's no depth to the production. There's no craft in the production. It's enough to get the voices up front and out there, and then a tried and true production formula will carry the rest. And this approach works well in the highly structured, insular, commercial environment of pop radio. Just as Cliff's Notes art works well in the highly structured, insular, commercial environment of the contemporary gallery or the festival installation space. But such bubblegum/Cliff's Notes products don't wear too well in 'real life'. 'Stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-only-three-things' items they ain't.

Not that everything has to be Tolstoy. But when so few things even attempt to be Tolstoy, and so many things are content to be Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum Cartoons, it gets kind of boring for ye olde art patron. The Cliff's Notes artist would say, "I'm just echoing the meaninglessness and frivolity of our post-modern culture." Well, why on earth would you want to do that? If I'm already drowning in banality, why do I need more of it?

These days I observe two extremes: either the art is stupid and frivolous and craftless and pissing into the void, or it's overboard, political, and tactical. The former is a silly punchline; the latter is a moral object lesson. Neither is currently doing much for me.

Here are some marginally applicable quotations:

Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and designer living in western North Carolina. His art uses language to undermine itself. Cloninger teaches Multimedia Arts & Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His work has been featured in I.D. Magazine and The New York Times, on ABC World News, and at multimedia arts festivals from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Digital Art Museum [DAM] Berlin, L'Instituto de México à Paris, and The Art Gallery of Knoxville. He regularly speaks at international art & design events like HOW Design, South by Southwest, and FILE. Cloninger also maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org, and deepyoung.org—in order to facilitate a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Essences of Wonder.