Contemporary Art as Aesthetic Innovation

Abstract

As a model of the creation and dissemination of knowledge, diffusion of innovation theory should be as applicable to the emergence of new art and artists as it is to new tehcnologies and scientific discoveries. However, the art world has rarely been used as a context for the study of the communication of new ideas, either by sociologists of art seeking to understand its social structures, or by communication scholars concerned with the movement of information within social networks. Therefore, in this article we explore the applicability of the diffusion model to communication processes in art, with a special emphasis on wheter contemporary artwork fits the characteristics of an aesthetic innovation.