Dematerialization describes the shift from physical art object to concept. From Lippard's 1968 essay to LeWitt's wall drawings, learn how art became idea.
In 1968, the American art critic Lucy R. Lippard and the art historian John Chandler published an essay in Art International titled "The Dematerialization of Art." They argued that the 1960s had seen a shift away from the physical art object toward art that emphasized the thinking process. "As more and more work is designed in the studio but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen," they wrote, "as the object becomes merely the end product, a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The studio is again becoming a study." They predicted that if the trend continued, "the object's becoming wholly obsolete." The essay appeared one year before Sol LeWitt published his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1969), which declared that "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Together, these two texts named and described the most significant transformation in art of the late 20th century: the separation of art from its physical support.
Dematerialization is the shift in art from the physical object to the concept, idea, or process. A dematerialized artwork may exist as a set of instructions, a photograph, a text, a performance, a temporary installation, or a social interaction. The physical artifact, if there is one, is secondary to the idea it embodies. The term was coined by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler in 1968, and Lippard expanded it in her 1973 book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The concept describes not a single movement but a tendency that cut across Conceptual Art, Minimalism, process art, earth art, performance, and Fluxus.
This entry covers what dematerialization is, how Lippard developed the concept, which artists embodied it, and why the idea still matters in contemporary art.
Dematerialization is the process by which art shifts its emphasis from the material object to the immaterial concept. The term does not mean that art becomes literally immaterial. A photograph is a physical object. A text is printed on paper. A performance takes place in a physical space with physical bodies. Lippard acknowledged this in the preface to Six Years: "It has often been pointed out to me that dematerialization is an inaccurate term, that a piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as 'material,' as a ton of lead. Granted. But for lack of a better term I have continued to refer to a process of dematerialization, or a deemphasis on material aspects (uniqueness, permanence, decorative attractiveness)."
The key phrase is "deemphasis on material aspects." Dematerialization is not the elimination of the object. It is the reduction of the object's importance. In a dematerialized artwork, the object is not the point. The point is the idea, the process, the instruction, or the relationship. The object, if it exists, is evidence that the idea occurred, not the idea itself.
The concept has roots in several earlier developments. Marcel Duchamp's readymades (1913-1917) separated artistic value from manual craft. The Dada movement's use of performance, photomontage, and nonsense poetry challenged the primacy of the unique art object. Constructivism in Russia treated art as engineering rather than expression. But dematerialization as a named tendency was specific to the late 1960s, when a critical mass of artists began working in ways that made the object secondary.
Lippard and Chandler's essay "The Dematerialization of Art" appeared in Art International in January 1968. The essay was short, about four pages, but its impact was immediate. The authors observed that the anti-intellectual, emotional processes of art-making characteristic of the 1950s had begun to give way to an "ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively." They identified a trend in which artists designed works in the studio but had them executed elsewhere, and in which the object became "merely the end product" rather than the site of artistic labor.
The essay connected this trend to broader cultural shifts. The authors cited physicist Murray Gell-Mann on the beauty of equations and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's description of discovering how nature works: "The goddam thing was gleaming." They argued that the scientist's aesthetic criteria, order and simplicity, were becoming the artist's criteria as well. They also connected dematerialization to the concept of entropy, drawing on Wylie Sypher's argument that "the future is that in which time becomes effective, and the mark of time is the increasing disorder toward which our system tends."
The essay was controversial. Critics argued that Lippard and Chandler were describing a trend, not defining a movement, and that the trend was overstated. But the essay gave a name to something that many artists were already doing, and the name stuck. Read the original essay at Sholette Seminars.
In 1973, Lippard published Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The book is not a conventional art history text. Lippard described it as "a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, antiform, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones)."
The book is deliberately chaotic. It reflects what Lippard called "the chaotic network of ideas in the air" between 1966 and 1971. It is arranged chronologically, with texts by and about artists inserted into a bibliography. The form of the book mirrors the dematerialization it describes: it is more like an archive or a database than a narrative. The Brooklyn Museum mounted an exhibition in 2024-2025 called "Materializing 'Six Years'" that examined Lippard's book and its impact on the emergence of Conceptual Art. A 2026 review in The Brooklyn Rail described the exhibition's opening section, "A Concrete Actuality," which examined Lippard's support of both Minimalism and post-Minimalism, including Ad Reinhardt's Untitled (Black Square) (1964) and Eva Hesse's ink-and-graphite drawings. Read the review at The Brooklyn Rail.
In the preface to Six Years, Lippard reflected on the concept six years after coining it. She acknowledged that "dematerialization is an inaccurate term" but defended it for lack of a better alternative. She also noted that the art establishment, which "depends so greatly on objects which can be bought and sold," would likely absorb conceptual art as another "movement" rather than fundamentally changing. In the postface, she was more blunt: "Unfortunately I don't think there are going to be many changes taking place immediately. I think the art world is probably going to be able to absorb conceptual art as another 'movement' and not pay too much attention to it."
A 2023 article in The Maine Arts Journal compiled and introduced Lippard's key texts on dematerialization, fifty-five years after the original essay. The article noted that the term "dematerialization" had enormous impact on art writing, first on the theorization of Conceptual Art and Minimalism, and eventually on other fields including music and architecture. Read the article at The Maine Arts Journal.
LeWitt is the artist most closely associated with dematerialization. His 1967 essay "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," published in Artforum, declared: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." LeWitt's Wall Drawings, begun in 1968, exist as sets of written instructions. Wall Drawing #118 (1971) instructs: "On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines." Anyone who follows the instructions produces the work. The drawing on the wall is not the artwork. The instructions are the artwork. The drawing is a realization, not an original. When a LeWitt wall drawing is removed from a wall and redrawn elsewhere, it is the same work, because the instructions have not changed.
Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965) presents a folding chair, a photograph of the chair, and a dictionary definition of "chair." The work is not any of the three objects. The work is the idea they generate: the question of what a chair is, what it means to represent one, and what it means to define one. The physical chair is a readymade. The photograph is a documentation. The definition is a text. None is primary. The concept is primary. You can read more about this approach in our entry on Conceptual Art.
Weiner's works exist as language. Statements (1968), his first book, contained propositions such as "A square removal from a rug in use" and "Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol." Weiner specified that the work need not be built. The statement itself was the work. If someone chose to realize it, that was fine. If no one did, the work still existed as language. Weiner's practice pushed dematerialization to its logical conclusion: the artwork is a sentence, and the sentence does not need a physical realization to be art.
Barry created works that were literally invisible. In Telepathic Piece (1969), he claimed to transmit a telepathic image to the audience at a gallery opening. There was nothing to see. The work consisted of the claim and the audience's attempt to receive the transmission. In Inert Gas Series (1969), Barry released measured quantities of inert gases (argon, neon, xenon) into the atmosphere of the Mojave Desert. The gases dispersed and became undetectable. The work existed only in its documentation: a typed statement describing the release.
Rainer, a choreographer, applied dematerialization to dance. Her No Manifesto (1965) declared: "No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendence of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic." Her Triple A (1978) used a standardized movement vocabulary that eliminated the expressive gesture, treating the body as a neutral instrument executing instructions rather than as a vehicle for personal expression. Rainer's work showed that dematerialization was not limited to visual art. It extended to any art form where the object or the performance could be reduced to a system or a score.
Kawara's Date Paintings (1966-2013), part of the Today series, are hand-painted canvases showing only the date on which they were made. Each painting was completed on the day it bore. If Kawara did not finish the painting by midnight, he destroyed it. The paintings are physical objects, but the concept they embody is temporal: the marking of a day's passing. The Today series ran for nearly fifty years and consists of over 3,000 paintings. The physical paintings are less important than the system that produced them: one painting per day, each dated, each completed or destroyed based on a deadline.
Lippard predicted that the art establishment would absorb dematerialized art as another movement. She was largely right. Conceptual Art, the most dematerialized of the practices she documented, became one of the most influential movements of the late 20th century. Its works are now held by every major museum. But the absorption created a paradox: works that were designed to resist commodification became commodities. A Sol LeWitt wall drawing can be bought and sold, even though the buyer receives only a certificate and a set of instructions. A Lawrence Weiner statement can be acquired, even though the statement is language that anyone can read.
The market resolved this paradox through the certificate of authenticity. The certificate, not the physical object, is what the collector buys. The certificate authorizes the realization of the work, and without it, the realization is not authentic. This means that the dematerialized artwork, which was supposed to escape the object, has simply shifted the object from the artwork itself to the legal document that authorizes it. The certificate is the new art object.
Dematerialization reshaped art in ways that extend far beyond the 1966-1972 period Lippard documented. Performance art, installation art, site-specific art, relational aesthetics, participatory art, and net art all descend from the dematerialization of the art object. Digital art, which has no physical form at all, is the most extreme case. An NFT is a certificate of ownership attached to a digital file. The file can be copied infinitely. The certificate is what makes one copy "authentic." This is the logic of dematerialization pushed to its conclusion: the object is irrelevant, and the authorization is everything.
The 2024-2025 Brooklyn Museum exhibition "Materializing 'Six Years'" demonstrated that Lippard's book remains a living document. The exhibition showed how Lippard's support for both Minimalism and post-Minimalism, for Ad Reinhardt's black paintings and Eva Hesse's organic sculptures, reflected her understanding that dematerialization was not a single movement but a tendency that could take radically different forms. The exhibition also showed how Lippard's later turn toward feminist art and political activism grew out of the same impulse: if the object is not the point, then the social and political context of the work becomes the point.
When you encounter a work that seems to be missing something, that is often the point. A wall with instructions written on it, a gallery with nothing in it but a text, a performance that consists of someone reading a list, a photograph of something that no longer exists: these are all dematerialized artworks. The absence of a conventional object is not a deficiency. It is the work's method.
Ask yourself: what is the work? Is it the thing on the wall, or is it the idea that produced the thing? If the thing were destroyed and remade according to the same instructions, would it be the same work? If the answer is yes, you are looking at a dematerialized artwork. The physical form is a realization, not the work itself.
Dematerialization is the theoretical foundation of Conceptual Art, which made the idea more important than the object. It connects to Minimalism, which reduced the object to its most basic form and opened the door to further reduction. It relates to the readymade, which separated artistic value from manual fabrication. It connects to process art, which emphasized the making over the made. It also relates to relational aesthetics, which extended dematerialization from the object to the social situation. For more on how ideas replaced objects, read our post on the evolution of art styles or explore our guide to modern versus contemporary art.
Sol LeWitt's wall drawings are on permanent display at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where a retrospective installation occupies three floors of the museum. The works are realized on the walls by trained installers following LeWitt's instructions. When the museum decides to change a drawing, the old one is painted over and a new one is drawn. The work is the same, because the instructions are the same. On Kawara's Date Paintings are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and other major collections. Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
For more on the ideas behind dematerialization, read our entries on Conceptual Art, Minimalism, and process art, or explore our post on why abstract art makes people uncomfortable.
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