Art dealers, curators and critics still cling to the idea that what constitutes today’s art with a capital “A” must be totally new and groundbreaking—but only to art history. Whatever the initial merits of this experiment, more than 60 years after the true game-changer of Abstract Expressionism (if only to use the U.S. as an example), the art world is still at it. Yet anyone remotely connected to Contemporary art with a shred of honesty would admit that the novelty idea went bankrupt some time ago. Heck, even Romanticism didn’t last longer than this. And novel in relation to what, exactly? When science and medicine go off in search of something new every day, diseases are cured and people live longer. In movies, music, fiction, or at HBO, creative novelty is just something that happens when it does. Even fashion isn’t as hell-bent on the shock of the new—because after all, an arm is still an arm that needs a piece of cloth wrapped around it. But since Contemporary art must constantly be fresh to its own history and little else, then no surprise that after a half-century of the mandate, we’re left with a stock-in-trade of $100 million paintings and vast numbers of reasonably intelligent members of the public looking as dimly on Contemporary art today as they did when Jackson Pollock still had time to sober up.