It is necessary to highlight several points that distinguish styles of conceptualism and symbolism similar in name from the actual ideas of conceptual (or new) symbolism. We call conceptual symbolism not only styles of fine arts, but also any other, both humanitarian and natural, based on the principles of the ultimate unknowability of being. Human knowledge here is like the lines of the horizon, just as arbitrary and receding as you approach.

This knowledge is a direct product of sensory experience, on which they rely in their fundamental constructions. Consequently, with a change in the types of perception, knowledge also changes - that is, ideas about the surrounding world. For example, the picture of the surrounding world would take on a completely different form if a person had the opportunity to directly perceive the temperature of other objects.

A person receives up to 80% of information about the world around him through sight, and it is visual arts that reproduce a person's idea of ​​the world around him. However, it is necessary to understand that this is only an idea of ​​the world around us, no matter how complex and colorful it may be. Moreover, complex paintings and so-called mathematical models arise from the futility of attempts to depict the environment with the help of visual arts.

One gets the impression that all the tricks of the artists, often framed in the form of various conceptual practices, have only one goal - to compensate for the imperfection of human senses. But these practices are created in line with the standard senses, and inherit all their imperfections.

Symbolism, in turn, actually appeals not to symbols, but to secondary phenomena, such as concepts, and has long become a complex picture or a kind of psychological puzzle. Therefore, the inclusion of the practice of symbolism in the category of visual arts seems strange and problematic.

All the details described above stand out in relief when considering conceptual symbolism from the point of view of their author, but it is also necessary to dwell on the peculiarities of the viewer's understanding of this style. Today this is a rather closed practice, not always oriented towards a contemporary - both due to the inertia of thinking, and in connection with the need to restructure all perception, which has been looking in the wrong direction for centuries. Nevertheless, the general dissatisfaction with the picture of the world with overwhelming complexity is evident and, let's hope that the coming cataclysms will lead to its radical change, including the parameters of perception.