KOSUTH, Joseph

Kosuth's principal achievement is such a unique art career it is hard to imagine anyone forecasting it. Whereas other artists had exhibited bits of language and sometimes even sentences, Kosuth in his early twenties showed whole paragraphs, not only in art magazines but, audaciously, on gallery walls. His prose reflected a dense, implicitly pretentious intellectual style derived from late writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), coupled with polemical disdain for nearly everyone...