The 'nerve' is in bringing something completely new into the world, something that didn't exist before.
What world are you talking about? Are you really believing in that? How can you (or anyone) say "This has never been done before"? Why should you (we) care about this anymore? The obsessive will for novelty in art is the worst part of occidental megalomaniac psyche.... Novelty is always a matter of context, perception, levels of appreciation... therefore it doesn't exist in culture or art. I'd say that "challenging" is a far more appropriate word to qualify what you (and so many others) call "new"... I find this word is more true to the contextual relationship of art and the environment it's received in. When Duchamps brought an "Urinoire" everybody some screamed of disgust others of genius, and now we take this event as a novelty of it's time, well it was certainly a challenge to established ways of exposing art or art itself but only in the given context of early twentieth century occident. I guess we're still trapped in dated formalism and this exclusively linear way of seeing time is leaving us thinking that novelty is criterion for art criticism. Olivier