“When Benjamin Buchloch referred to the conceptual and minimal generation of the 1960s, he defined the artist as a ‘scholar/philosopher/craftsman’, who hands society ‘the objective results of his labour’. For Buchloch, this figure was heir to that of the artist as ‘mediumic and transcendental subject’, represented by Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and Joseph Beuys. Recent developments in art merely modify Buchloch’s hunch. Today’s artist appears as an operator of signs, modelling production structures so as to provide significant doubles. An entrepreneur/politician/director. The most common denominator shared by all artists is that they show something. The act of showing suffices to define the artist, be it a representation or a designation.”
Relational Aesthetics, pg 108