Daniel Stanford, the Center's founder, has a message for conceptual artists: you're fired.

Rather than drawing attention to an overlooked subject or holding a mirror up to society, conceptual art is quickly becoming a competition for the most inventive “what if?” “What if I suspended a plastic bag full of baby food over the body of a dead llama wearing a party hat? I could call it End of Innocence! Or what if I had an elderly woman smear raw hamburger meat on her face while dancing on pages ripped out of tabloid magazines? I could call it Word of Mouth!” Sadly, although it took me about 90 seconds to create these concepts, it is unlikely that they are unique. Someone has probably already passed them off as insightful performance pieces about aging and death or as a revealing installation focusing on commercialism and greed.

With each new wave, conceptual artists pull from a more bizarre and incompatible set of ingredients than the last, combining them to create a perfectly incomprehensible work that critics can herald as the next big thing. Taking my cue from these artists, who seem to have taken their cue from a room full of monkeys randomly striking typewriters, I have created the Conceptual Art Center.

Each time a piece in the Center's collection is viewed, it is completely unique. It exists on one computer screen at one location in the world. It cannot be recreated and it is immediately replaced by the next piece that is generated. This is because each piece in the collection is dynamically generated from a database of photos and text strings. The photos came from Google image searches, using general subject keywords such as “fish” or “balloon” or “donkey.” The artist statements I wrote myself.

Having spent much of my time in grad school reading art criticism textbooks and attending conceptual art exhibitions, writing artist statements devoid of any clear meaning now comes quite naturally to me. So, I wrote a series of brief, non-specific ramblings that could apply to nearly any artwork, then used a little programming to randomly combine them, creating a new statement each time a concept is generated.

The art critic quotes are randomly paired with an image in a similar fashion, but with one small distinction—they are not an exaggeration of my jaded mind, but direct quotes taken straight from the pages of several leading art journals and magazines. When I began my research, I thought I might be lucky to find just a few quote-worthy examples of the verbose, vague statements I was looking for. In less than one hour, I had found 20.

Because conceptual art does not rely on aesthetic appeal or practical functionality, it seems obvious that it should at least communicate a clear message that resonates with its intended audience. Yet, artists have sacrificed meaning for originality and shock value, while critics have been busy inventing new buzzwords and poetic fluff, rather than serving as interpreters for a bewildered public. The Conceptual Art Center exists to end this orgy of self-indulgence and demands an accessible approach to the creation and criticism of conceptual art.

Of course, I could have this all wrong. If, in fact, conceptual artists can be judged solely on their ability to dream up nonsensical events or visuals that have never before been presented as art, then I will gladly acknowledge my error in exchange for the title of world’s most progressive conceptual artist (with proper documentation in a few respected art journals, of course). I have invented a machine that dynamically combines snippets of my artistic genius to create a nearly limitless collection of unique art concepts. This invention can only lead the art world to accept one of two conclusions. Either I am correct in thinking that most conceptual art has been reduced to a formulaic exercise in free association, or I am the most brilliant and original conceptual artist who has ever lived.