[W]hile you are free to stare at a blank ream of paper for 1000 hours, your publisher will only laugh [if you do]. Jeff Koons can have his interns paint his ideas, John Cage can sit in front of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, but writers lack the auspices of conceptual absence. Even conceptual writing requires that slow painful aggregate of words, one at a time, making something from nothing. Every word is work. There is no short cut.
—Jimmy Chen on the difference between conceptual writing and other types of conceptual art
