White and Black, from the series Art as Idea

Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio, and moved to New York in 1965. He immediately began making works that investigated language and meaning in relation to visual art, most notably through the series Art as Idea, to which this diptych belongs. Kosuth used a method of photographic reproduction to enlarge dictionary definitions to 4-foot squares that hang on the wall like paintings. The series includes definitions for words such as “water,” “art,” “painting,” and even “definition” itself, all in an effort to demonstrate the failure of language to constitute the equivalent of what it purports to describe—the printed definition of water, for example, offers something different than a painting or photograph of water, which still is not the same as the physical experience of water.