Check out my review of Rob Fitterman's and Vanessa Place's Notes on Conceptualisms currently up at BOMB's blog. Thanks to BOMB editor Mónica de la Torre for her feedback and encouragement."Whereas conceptual art prioritized the dematerialization of the art object as a means of overcoming art-as-commodity, conceptualist practices in recent poetry deconstruct the authority of author and text by prioritizing ideas as the principle source of a work’s authority. Doing so, conceptualist writers invite their erstwhile readership into a discourse about poetry’s function as a site of institutional, epistemic, pedagogical, and social authority (rather than into debates about how “good” or “bad” a poem may be). Economics is still a big target for poetic conceptualism, but not so much the status of the poem as commodity since poetry tends to operate in a much smaller economy than that of visual arts (the poets whom I know best, for instance, tend to subsist through a gift economy by which the poet is communally vetted, whereas visual artists tend to operate in an economy of commodity exchange even when their works are contesting the very economic system through which their works find subsistence.)"
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