Essay Proposal The purpose of my essay is analysing the relationship between commodification and dematerialization of the artwork, taking

as a starting point Lucy R. Lippard seminal essay. In the text The Materialization of Art, written in 1971, the author observes how, especially during the Sixties, ultra conceptual art movements has profoundly changed the mode of production of art. In this period artists, focusing their attention almost solely on the thinking process, have lost interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The consequences of this are twofold. From one side, this trend has provoked what the author calls the dematerialization of art, and as a consequence, the obsolescence of the art object as previously conceived. On the other hand, also the role of the artist has changed importantly. In the first instance , it is interesting to notice that the author seems to equate conceptual, abstract and dematerialized art. Therefore I think it would be a good idea trying to understand and re-define these terms, also in the light of the advent of the computer. We can affirm, for instance, that there are dematerialized works of art, which are not conceptual or abstract (an mp3 song). Differently, we can see as conceptual a work of art that is neither abstract nor dematerialized (for example Duchamps Fountain). Are these definitions somehow related to the role of the viewer, or differently to the quality of the artists work? With regards to the phenomenon of the obsolescence of the object, it seems to me worth saying how this is related to the loss of importance of the use value in our society. Lippard claims that the use of serial scheme permits a combination of art as idea and art as action. In conceptual art, the artwork becomes a formula, which represents the idea that the artist wants to express. Similarly, in the book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) , Baudrillard affirms that commodity fetishism becomes an active agent that produces object-signs. As a consequence, in the market object, use value is replaced with sign value, which in turn creates exchange value. Conceptual artworks and commodities are therefore both symbols. Can we consider abstraction as a fundamental passage in the process of commodification of the artwork? Vice versa, can we see abstraction as the result of commodification? Dematerialization and technological development are surely inextricably linked. Hence, the artists work over the last two decades has changed qualitatively. Lucy Lippard affirms that the study as replaced the studio. Nowadays, we can even say that, more and more often, the computer has replaced both. What is then the connection between abstract work, dematerialization and virtualization? Maybe it would be interesting, in terms of curatorial practice analyse an example of dematerialized museum, which shows dematerialized works of art: a virtual museum as the example in this link: http://galleryoflostart.com