... rather arid semiotic scholasticism ...

"For [Gregory Battcock], Conceptual art had not yet devolved into the rather arid semiotic scholasticism so common today, which, whether descriptive or more ambitiously deconstructive, tends to focus either on Conceptualism's creation of new kinds of objects (albeit 'dematerialized' ones) or on its philosophical demonstration of the artwork's unstable discursive foundations." -- from "Transformer: David Joselit on Gregory Battcock" in Artforum international, v. 51, no. 1, September 2012, p. 508. I remember buying the Battcock anthologies on new tendencies in art, way back in the 1960s and early 1970s.