Art that is intended to convey an idea or a concept to the perceiver, is known as Conceptual Art. It is art in which the idea involved in the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The genre often rejects the creation or appreciation of a traditional art object such as a painting or a sculpture as a precious commodity. 

The notion that art should examine its own nature became prominent with the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible. One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects. Conceptual art came to denote all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. It could be said that one of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself.

'Cloudgate' Polished Stainless Steel Sculpture by Anish Kappur 2006

Many works of conceptual art, sometimes called installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.

        Henrique Oliveira

Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Dadaism.  Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artist and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in Modern Art in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (like Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind. His seminal piece titled fountain consisted of a urinal simply hung on the wall at the 1913 Armory show in New York. Though the work was panned by most critics, it was the center of all conversation in the art world for years to come.

Robert Smithson was a pioneer of conceptual art. In the early sixties he began creating art installations outside that he called 'Earthworks'. He is most famous for his peice entitled 'Spiral Jetty', which he created by moving large quantities of rock and dirt with a dump truck.