Davide Dal Sasso's 'Nel segno dell'essenziale' rethinks conceptual art

Davide Dal Sasso's book 'Nel segno dell'essenziale. L’arte dopo il concettualismo' (Rosenberg & Sellier, 2020, 371 pp., €28) argues for a new theoretical framework for conceptual art, moving beyond the dematerialization thesis. Dal Sasso distinguishes between 'maximalist' and 'reductionist' art, drawing on Wittgenstein's later philosophy and Ermanno Migliorini's distinction between stereotype and ectype. The book's six chapters analyze conceptualism as an attitudinal expression, not a postmodern phenomenon, identifying a first linguistic-analytical phase and a second critical-political phase. Dal Sasso emphasizes the materiality of conceptual art, contradicting Lucy Lippard's dematerialization claim, and introduces a 'cluster' model of criteria for defining art. He sees conceptual art as vital and fluid, replacing iconic stasis with temporal immediacy, and proposes a hybridization of maximalist and reductionist approaches. The work extends the concept of art by examining creation and evaluation criteria.