“Idea is king, all my work is idea based.”
What does “idea based” mean?
It means, “Look at me! I am so smat!”
Not too many hits out there for the meaning, just the term used in various places. Here’s one:
Now I’m not sure if they’re defining “idea-based”, or describing the usage of “content” in the context of art.
Even your second quote, if you see the rest of it, falls in line with the quote I provided:
But if you ask me, that in and of itself works as a definition of Art. To state that it is “idea-based” is redundant (with a bit of a high-brow, pretentious angle to it).
It’s that the conception behind the art is what the artist is interested in.
Of course, that idea is always the easiest part of any art. There were plenty of ideas in Plan 9 From Outer Space, but the problem with the film wasn’t the ideas; it was the execution of them.
I’m not sure I could describe it in visual-medium arts like painting or sculpture, but it’s pretty clear in literature. Science fiction, for instance, tends to be very idea-based. Larry Niven, for instance, once sat down and came up with the idea of a story set in a free-floating torus of gas surrounding a neutron star, instead of being on the surface of a planet or in some artificial enclosure, and then wrote a novel around that idea. There’s only one novel in the world based on that (well, two, but that’s just because he also wrote a sequel). That’s an idea-driven book. By contrast, there are millions of books out there about a guy who falls in love with a girl and, after some hardships, gets her to fall in love with him, too, and they live happily ever after. A book like that isn’t based on the idea nearly so much as it is on the presentation of the idea.
So, in the metaphysical sense, is the artist iattempting to use the idea-itself as the art-itself? In this case, “idea-itself” would refer to the metaphysical concept or image that the artist intended to express, not necessarily the real-world art-piece itself…
Tom Wolfe wrote a book called The Painted Wordwhich addresses what the OP seems to be talking about (if I understand correctly).
Wolfe is critical of “idea based” art.
He writes about the 60s art scene and the rise of the dominance of art theory over the actual execution of the art itself. The art became merely an illustration of some theoretical position, and in a sense became incapable of being appreciated - even “seen” - without knowing all the wordy theory which it was supposed to be based upon. Hence, the “Painted Word”.
An example (not exactly from the 60s, but no matter) was Meret Oppenheim’s fur covered cup and saucer. At the time, artists were thinking about the fragmentation of form from surface texture as a way of challenging assumptions about things - a real house is mundane and passes unnoticed, but a gingerbread house (shorn of Hansel and Gretel connotations) forces us to think about the nature of “house” and the nature of “food”. We are struck and enlightened at the same time.
Note, however, that taken to its extreme, it is not actually necessary to construct a gingerbread house in order to grok the concept.
Same with the cup and saucer. Fragmenting form and surface startles us into re-noticing as if for the first time what a cup and saucer is. And there are further resonances with oral sexuality, etc. But the idea here expresses itself perfectly well by merely inviting you to imagine a fur covered cup and saucer. You don’t actually have to go to all the trouble of making one made in real life in order to express the point.
But the converse is true, too. If you just saw the cup and saucer without intricate prior explanation of the theoretical perspective which was its origin, it is unlikely you would “get” the point. It would just look whimsical.
This is, of course, not the only “idea” that artists have illustrated in this way - theories of flatness and other examples abound.
Wolfe’s criticism of idea art is that it ultimately disappears up its own bum, and devalues the skill involved in actual execution of the idea. For my part, I am not sure that that is not too reductionist. But it makes for fascinating conversation.
The idea, sorry, started late 19th/early 20th century with a series of pronouncements, articles, interviews, and general provocateuring by groups of artists fighting the stifling art establishment of their era. The first actual manifesto seems to have been by the Futurists in 1909. Wiki has an astoundingly long page listing manifestos. You can also see the one by DeStijl in 1918.
Like anything else, manifestos grew more extreme over time, as groups tried to out-épater le bourgeois. By the 1960s, the era that Wolfe wrote about, they had grown undecipherable by anyone except group members and the few academics who followed them. (Did you know that Wolfe’s Ph.D. was in art history?) And the art composed by these groups could only be understood by those who read their manifestos and try to put two and beta together to make pi. Most people thought the effort not worth it. I mostly agree, although as always some good stuff emerged regardless.
Intellectual artists in other fields followed in the footsteps of the futurists. Much modern architecture can only be appreciated in regard to the intentions of the cult that developed it. Modern literature had similar strictures and limitations. The academics saw a good thing and started their own movements, like structuralism and deconstruction, and made them quite deliberately near-impossible to decipher so that anyone who wanted in had to earn the position.
Postmodernism mostly disavowed manifestos or twisted and mocked them, but you still see them pop up occasionally. The one that may be best known today is the Dogme 95 filmmaking movement of Lars van Trier, which called for abandoning the mechanical nature of Hollywood films for a simpler and personal filmmaking.
The real problem with most of this, especially the art-based ones, is that, as a group, artists can’t write for shit. Their words on those little placards taped up next to a piece in a gallery or museum mostly make me want to giggle hysterically or vomit. They might mean something, for all I know, but hideously hidebound and tied to actual syntactical meaning as I am, they don’t work for me. I’ve always gotten the feeling that Wolfe felt the same way and that was the secret root of his book.
Idea Based?..sounds like nonsense to me…what the hell does “State of the art” mean anyway?
People just make this crap up and we oblige as if we know what the hell they are saying.
I fart in their general direction.
Hmm…I guess that wasn’t very idea based but it was the presentation that counts.
I’ve seen that film, and there were major problems with the ideas, too.
“Can you see or measure an atom? Yet you can explode one. A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms!”
I don’t see how ‘idea based’ would be any different from ‘conceptual’ art, where the representation of the real world is secondary to the concept inspiring the artefact.
You misspelled smrt. 
related phraseology:
Person having ordinary skill in the art
Definition of Person Skilled in the Art
“Idea based” usually means “I have an idea for an art work” But I don’t have enough skill or I am too lazy to actually make it. Besides, If I talk about it I can make it sound more cool then the crappy thing I could actually make.
A work of art is idea based if, when you have the description, you could make it yourself, even if you have little artistic talent.
Idea based: “Let’s tie a starving dog down in a museum and put up a big sign spelling “hunger” made from dog kibble just out of his reach. Let the dog die in that museum”. (I think this genuine art, although ethically questionable and utterly gruesome)
Also idea based: "I’m going to make a painting 10 by 10 yards of an extremely intense red, and call it "Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue". (I think this is, to a large extent, baked air, emperors new clothes, yadayada)
Not idea based: I’m painting a nude girl, and the painting should express her vulnerability and discomfort at being nude. It’s going to be intense, dark and a bit eerie".
I agree, with the first part, idea based art and conceptual art is IMHO the same thing. Idea based it just the lates fashion word for it.
Your definition is correct, and thanks for providing it.
However, any artist who actually utters this sentence in my presence had better be something other then a painter, or a sculptor. In those professions, an artwork IS the execution.
Besides, most artists have very boring, and vulgar ideas. “War is bad”. “Oppression is bad”. “Consumerism is bad” “Modern existence is bad” “Erotism is good”.
Yawn.
It means it’s not “execution based” – Never mind that I haven’t bothered to spend the time learning how to draw, paint, carve, sculpt, or any other skill that would actually make my art good; just be impressed with my idea!
Something that comes to mind is a fountain Hundertwasser placed in the lobby of the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna. It has jets that cause the water to flow upward. It is ugly, and it doesn’t work very well, but, hey, it was kind of a cool idea.