Sprinkling glitter onto a piece of paper is embellishing. This is not the same as cutting, tearing, wetting it to form papier mâché, folding, burning, dying or applying any other treatment to change the form of the media and create new textures. Artistic innovation is finding a new way to manipulate a material rather than merely decorating it with foreign objects.
Use ordinary elements in unexpected ways. The pantomime group, Mummenschanz, uses toilet paper, notepads, garbage bags and wet clay in their performances. They have developed a particular adeptness at using these ordinary elements to express emotions and clear conceptual messages. Andy Warhol gave rise to indignation and controversy in 1964 as to what is "really art" when he unveiled his first of a series of works using common consumer products as his subject matter. Almost 50 years earlier, Marcel Duchamp used a similar tactic by purchasing a urinal, signing it and putting it on display as art. The urinal was deemed "the most influential modern art work of all time," by a poll of 500 art experts in 2004.
Music videos are a prime example of art forms combined. Mummenshanz uses this tactic, as well, combining the visual arts with pantomime. Pablo Picasso incorporated time and space into his paintings. The late Alexander McQueen combined theater and technology into his fashion shows, as well as used unexpected materials for his clothing fashions and the incorporation of sculpture into his shoes. An artist can always find room for innovation by expanding out of his area of expertise and bringing in elements of the other arts.
In the surrealist film "Le Chien Andalou," a co-production between film maker Luis Buñel and painter Salvador Dali, a disturbing opening scene where a woman´s eyeball is lanced is sending a message to the viewers: View the film from a different perspective to which one is accustomed. Art which causes controversy is usually expressed in multi-faceted ways, while the viewers are seeing the work only from their own perspective, as evidenced by Lady Gaga´s meat dress at the Video Music Awards in 2010. The key to being innovative is to constantly expose and immerse oneself into new unknown things in order to understand and express art from a new perspective.