John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020)[1] was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images.

When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968.

His first classes included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Ken Feingold, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, and Troy Brauntuch.

Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions.

This work referenced art historian George Kubler's seminal book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things.

The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.

Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials (such as film stills), take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences.

"[20] In "Double Bill", a 2012 series of large inkjet prints,[21] Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions.

[22][23] Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules.

The writer eldritch Priest ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) as an early example of post-conceptual art.

Following Baldessari's seminal statement "I will not make any more boring Art", he conceived the work The Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club (1972–73), composed of 30 photographs of the artist swinging and hitting with a golf club objects excavated from a dump, as a parody of cataloging rather than a thorough straight classification.

Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures.

Circular adhesive dots covering up the faces of photographed and painted portraits are a prevailing motif in Baldessari's work from the mid-1980s onward.

[27] The artist himself suspected that, despite the broad array of approaches he's taken over the course of his career, he will be best remembered as "the guy who puts dots over peoples faces.

Describing his initial intuitive leap in this direction, Baldessari said, "I just had these price stickers I was using for something else, in some graphic way and I put them on all the faces and I just felt like it leveled the playing field.

The lithograph was created in conjunction with the now renowned exhibition for which – at Baldessari's request – students endlessly wrote the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls.

His 1988 prints, The Fallen Easel and Object (with Flaw), represented a major shift in Baldessari's approach to presentation, allowing a more complex relationship between his found imagery.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery and Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, first attempted to realize Baldessari’s idea in 2011 and the resulting paperwork of failed attempts to procure a willing male cadaver was displayed in the exhibition "11 Rooms" at the Manchester International Festival.

In this piece, the artist walked into a class of art students who had never seen him, set up a video camera to document the proceedings, and left the room.

For the 2017/2018 season at the Vienna State Opera he designed the large-scale image (176 m2 (1,890 sq ft)) "Graduation" for the ongoing series "Safety Curtain", conceived by museum in progress.

[52] Baldessari set a personal auction record when his acrylic-on-canvas piece Quality Material (1966–1968) was sold for $4.4 million at Christie's New York in 2007.

In 1990, Baldessari purchased a bungalow in the coastal Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica and enlisted architects Ron Godfredsen and Danna Sigal for a redesign.