Ideas can be beautiful. Scientific theories can be neat and intriguing. They can inspire you with a sense of their rightness or fitness. Einstein would only follow a line of thought or a theory in which he saw some intrinsic beauty. I can see why conceptual art exists. If the idea is wonderful then the idea can be more important than the object at the end of the process. The problem lies in relying solely on an idea that is pretentious or trite. An idea needs to mean something to more than one person – the artist. Pretentious ideas combined with a lack of basic artistic skill lead to mediocrity. This in turn gives conceptual art a bad name. I think art sometimes requires that you reach a point where you no longer consciously understand what you are doing – whether in formulating an original idea or a visual image. Our mind seems capable of doing more than we realise when we let instinct rule over experience.