Duchamp's urinal, Picasso's explosions of classical forms—The Inner Stone is almost a parodic retort to the modernist and postmodernist obsession with stripping away facades. It is a consummation of Noguchi's identification of the works of human beings with the qualities of decency and vitality. The sculpture is not really a sculpture at all, but a geological/esthetic revelation. All Noguchi did was cut away a chunk of the stone's rough exterior to reveal a smooth, subtle, ordered interior. This is not the creation of something new, like Manet's Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe, which revolutionized painting's subject matter, or Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which revolutionized painting's formal qualities. Those watershed works stripped away aesthetic convention in order to create a new aesthetic—one that celebrated energy and intuition, but also one that was nevertheless highly cultured and refined. Rather than creating something new, Noguchi consecrated what was always there. The Inner Stone's beautiful skeined layers and striations seem to proclaim a revolution of the permanent. In Noguchi's thrilling tactility, novelty and newness are beside the point.