I’ve just been scanning the recently announced Beck’s Futures shortlist. It is actually a rather long list of 13 young artists chosen by six older, better-known ones. The nominees include Jamie Shovlin, who shows art by imaginary artists in exhibitions curated by imaginary curators, Sue Tompkins, who does performance poetry, and Bedwyr Williams, whose work can be indistinguishable from stand-up comedy.

The ten others work in the familiar limitless array of media now employed by contemporary artists: video, photography, books, architecture, installation, even painting.

Crash my party you bastards, a work by Richard Hughes, one of the nominees, is made of artfully arranged debris. It reminded me of one of my tutors at art college who said he sometimes applied “the rubbish dump test” to work by students. If their work was thrown on to a rubbish dump, would passers-by say: “Oh, look, there is a work of art on that dump”, or would they pass by oblivious to the discarded piece of avant garde? To this day I am not sure which result constitutes a pass or a fail in my tutor’s eyes. If they had spotted something recognisably an art work, was that good or bad?

On the Beck’s Futures website the word “innovative” crops up several times. Terms such as innovative, original, ground-breaking and cutting-edge make me suspicious. These are not words an artist would ever use about himself or his work. They are PR terms, they are words used to engage a news agenda, to appeal to a desire akin to the male sexual appetite, a lust for fresh meat. The economist and social philosopher Ludwig von Mises said: “Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes the need of the public.”

We live in an age addicted to newness. It is a core attribute of any successful person or product in our consumer society. The whole economic system in the developed world depends on our continuing desire for new things that we often do not need. Do you remember the Innovations catalogue?

How long has being new been a way of saying something is good in art? When did this quality take on a life of its own apart from being beautiful or thought-provoking? When I see something I have not seen before, a binary switch is thrown in my head and the memory is tipped into the box marked “new experience”. This gives me a little thrill and I take it for granted that I have seen “a good thing”.

I think we have evolved this internal reward system because in primitive times to notice something new enhanced our chances of survival. To spot what was unfamiliar was to respond to potential danger or an opportunity to learn something that may have been useful. So maybe a love of new experiences is as innate in us as a desire to see the familiar faces of friends.

What worries me is that maybe our lust for newness is clouding our judgment. Perhaps we have become unable to rely any more on our own awareness of whether we are having a good experience or not. So confused are we by the welter of conflicting messages that bombard us daily that we rely instead on instant tests of worth such as “is it new?”.

In art, tradition, the opposite of new, has long taken a back seat; in fact, it seems to have become almost a dirty word. Freshness, revolution, originality are the holy grail. Every time I visit an art fair or biennale, I come away feeling that I must have seen it all. Every gimmick, angle and trick in the book has been employed by artists in their clamour for my attention. Be it 50 Chinese people standing in a room or two identical art galleries next to each other, I can recall what micro categories of artistic practice seemed original to me. I certainly remember these works in the same way as I might remember a car accident or a good joke. Whether that means they are good art or not I find harder to judge as I am bedazzled by their entertaining novelty.

When I was at school people would draw in art lessons with their free hand shielding their work from prying eyes, such was the currency of “originality” and the fear of it being copied. Later, when I studied art history, I found out that pretty much everything has been done, and usually by some obscure conceptual artist a surprisingly long time ago. Now I find the pursuit of originality futile.

I am in Japan again, a nation mainlining novelty. I am working in an art school famous for teaching traditional techniques such as Japanese painting — this is painting with the work laid on the floor and using mineral pigments and natural glue. They also have courses teaching traditional craft skills in metal hammering, ceramics and weaving. I find the sight of old skills and styles being passed on very satisfying to the old codger in me.

Art schools in Britain also have their proud tradition to uphold. They are key capitalist engines, founts of innovative ideas born in idealistic young hearts that will filter into the marketplace and help to sell us more stuff, probably made in China. I’ll drink to that.