Art without the artist, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the Boston Globe TARA DONOVAN'S PINS are hard to miss. There are thousands of them upstairs at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. They're smushed together almost as if dropped into a trash compactor, except instead of being bent, they form a 3½-foot-tall block of sinewy, shiny metal. This is art, and it sits in the center of a gallery at the ICA, one of the signature pieces of the museum's collection.

Stare at "Untitled (Pins)," and you're likely to have questions. How does this cube stick together? Is it solid or a kind of pin shell? And what of the artist? Did Donovan get pricked as she manipulated the piece? Was she wearing protective gloves? What kind of care and persistence did it require for her to turn these thousands of glittering pins into such a perfect square?

One thing you might not expect: Donovan didn't put "Untitled (Pins)" together at all. The New York City artist figured out how to shape a mass of pins and sent instructions to the museum; the work was assembled in July, and again in August, entirely by the hands of ICA employees.

Surprised? Don't be. Like any museum of contemporary art, the ICA is full of works built by somebody other than the artist, from Kelly Sherman's Foster Prize-winning "Wish Lists," a collection of personal wish lists gathered from the Internet, to "Cell (Hand and Mirror)," a mysterious Louise Bourgeois piece featuring a pair of carved marble hands in the center of miniature room.

In Cambridge, Harvard's Carpenter Center was recently home to an installation piece of cellophane-wrapped candies laid in a golden carpet across the ground floor of the center. The work is credited to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but was actually built by curator Helen Molesworth. (Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996.) At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, several pieces in the Spencer Finch exhibit - including a majestic stained-glass wall - were simply assembled according to the artist's specs. And last September, when the Boston Center for the Arts hosted "Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off" by Scottish artist Martin Creed, in which the gallery's 67 track lights illuminated the white walls and then flicked off every five seconds, not only did Creed not set up the exhibition, he didn't even fly to Boston while it was up.

As contemporary art becomes more mainstream, and successful artists become "brands" that draw huge sale prices and big museum crowds, legions of art viewers are now finding themselves confronting "original" works created by someone other than the person listed on the wall label.

What qualifies such artwork as original, and whether it should matter whether the artist physically created the work, is a debate that has occupied academic corners of the art world for years. But if museumgoers believe - reasonably - that the point of seeing original art is to connect intimately with the artist who crafted the piece before them, they are opening themselves up to a rude surprise. In a contemporary art museum, it's now fair to expect that chunks of a collection were never touched by the artist at all.

In one way or another, contemporary artists have been handing off the actual making-of part for years. Who would expect Richard Serra to hand-install one of his thousand-ton steel sculptures, or for Christo and Jeanne-Claude to be out in Central Park hanging the 23 miles of nylon panels that made up "The Gates"?

But when viewing more intimate works, especially sculpture and painting, part of the appeal has always been standing in the presence of the unique hand of the artist. Vincent van Gogh spent years developing the swirling technique that would define his dramatic wheatfield oil works in Saint-Rémy. Jackson Pollock took pride in his "action painting," sometimes poking holes in paint cans to create a delicious stream, sometimes picking up a turkey baster to put on the finishing touches.

The intensely personal feel in a van Gogh, Pollock, or Picasso may be part of why works of the artists can fetch millions on the auction market, and reliably draw millions of visitors to museums to see the paintings in person.

Though that understanding of art may still drive individual viewers, it's not so current in the art world. As far back as 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed "R. Mutt" to "Fountain," a urinal meant to signal his move away from painting into Dada-inspired provocations. In the 1960s, the movement called "conceptualism" came into its own: An artwork could be a barricade of oil barrels blocking a Parisian street, or pages of a book chewed up, dissolved in acid, and then "poured" into bottles to be sent back to a library. What did it matter who did the chewing? Suddenly, the idea was more important than the creation of it.

John Baldessari, a pioneer of conceptual art, trained as a painter and earned a degree in art, but in 1968 held a cremation in which he burned all his paintings as a way of holding himself to his new plan: to stop using technique and commit to the maxim that the idea is everything. These days, he has a handful of assistants to help create his collages, videos, and other conceptual works. In addition, some pieces - prints more than 60 inches wide, all framing - are "jobbed out" completely and done elsewhere.

"It's delegation," says Baldessari, 76. "An architect is a classic example. He doesn't have to build a house. A composer doesn't always have to conduct his work so why should an artist?"

Some artists have built entire careers on this concept. Sol LeWitt, though trained as a conventional artist, began to recruit teams of installers to create "his" pencil drawings, obsessively detailed works done on gallery walls, and then removed. The team approach became part of what viewers appreciated in a LeWitt work - and makes possible the curious exhibit being mounted later this year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. LeWitt died at age 78 last year, but the show goes on: close to 40 trained installers will spend six months creating nearly a half-mile of his penciled and painted wall drawings. It will be the largest-ever LeWitt show featuring these works - and will be created entirely posthumously.

"I think he was very interested in the notion that the idea itself could carry great power," explains Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, which is collaborating with Mass MoCA on the $9 million project. "If he showed the idea to others, people would enthusiastically enjoy participating in that experience."

But artists such as LeWitt and Baldessari make the gap between "artist" and "maker" part of the fun of the work. That's not the case with Donovan, Sherman, or Finch. Creating "Untitled (Pins)" is not some kind of social gathering. It is business carried out by an installer who pours the pins into a mold, and then removes that mold to leave the cube.

For Donovan, having another person create her pin sculpture is not a statement. It's practical.

"If I installed everything, I would never be in my studio," says Donovan in a recent phone interview. "I'd be following everything around all the time."

Donovan created the first cubes by her own hands a decade ago while experimenting in her studio. But now, whether you're a collector buying one through one of her galleries or a museum - the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego has a pin cube - you're expected to assemble it on your own. Donovan does send instructions.

She believes that her work is done before a sculpture is seen by the public.

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