The artist who wants to conceptually innovate asks; “is this art”?  But when is it?  Or, in contemporary art, when is an innovation not considered art?  Perhaps rather than to innovate an artist has to have a point of view, just being innovative is too easy, a point of view is something that is earned and sustained over time.  Innovation from a point of view has an inner logic that innovation for its own sake does not.  From a point of view innovation can evolve because the known forms have become inadequate for what one wants to express.  An innovation would be felt as if it were needed to uncork some conceptual or perceptual bottleneck.  Were Braque’s and Picasso’s use of bits of paper glued onto a painting serving to liberate painting’s potential depiction of some new reality with the insertion of the real into the illusion?  Were they pointing out the artificiality of all painting?  (But this surmise is too banal to be worth considering.)  Or were they simply doing something that occurred to one of them as an interesting thing to do?

The artist who does not acquire a craft and who attempts conceptual innovation has nothing to fall back on when the pubic loses interest.  He is dependent on the audience to pick up on his latest conceptual insight instead of getting his insights integrated into an object that he can make by himself and can stand-alone.  This is what David W Galenson* points out when he says conceptual innovators peak early.  In contemporary art artists need an immediate communication instead of learning a craft to search for an elusive point of view.  On the other hand, when an artist who strives toward experimental innovation has an exhibition his arrangement of the work is an opportunity for a conceptual innovation.  Even if the objects are perceptual experiments the order in which they are hung has potential meaning from the buried signs, symbols, and utterances a curator may not notice when viewed in the studio.

*Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-century Art, David W Galenson, Cambridge University y Press 2009, pp10-74.