What goes around . . .

"Thirty years ago, conceptual artists claimed to have broken with the forms of commodified art by no longer creating solid objects available for private ownership, but instead specific forms for the presentation or spatialization of ideas: a hole in a wall, a crack running through a building, [the New York Times], a line in the desert, etc. And yet intellectual and artistic property did not disappear; it simply underwent a displacement. Artists increasingly began to be viewed--and paid--as owners and sellers of ideas as such. This meant that intelligence itself came to take the place of its products, implying a radicalization in the idea of private property. The immateriality of concepts and images, instead of doing away with private appropriation, turned out to be its best refuge, the place where its reality is tantamount to its self-legitimation."

--Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics [except for the part about the NY TIMES]