CONCEPTUAL: Pertaining to concepts. More specifically, art possessing imagery that departs from perceptual accuracy to present a conception of the object, rather than its appearance alone. It has become fairly standard, for example, to characterize the rigidly formal art of ancient Egypt as conceptual, whereas Courbet's Realism is perceptual. Lest it be thought that perceptual art is really without ideas (or ideology), however, see Norman Bryson's critiques of Ernst Gombrich's perceptualism in Word and Image, Tradition and Desire, and elsewhere. See also social formation.