… Johns Hopkins conference on The Science of the Arts, the most intriguing came from a biologist who, when asked if he thought aesthetic creation and receptivity were hardwired in us for evolutionary reasons, said:
No, I don’t think so. Our brains are so powerful… art is an epiphenomenon of that power. Art has fallen out as a side-effect of our complexity and sophistication as creatures. Art is clearly about communication, which is a fairly low-level survival skill… We’re not hardwired to be appreciators of art at a Darwinian level; we’ve simply evolved an incredibly complex central nervous system out of which art appreciation has evolved. When you have levels of complexity that are extremely high, you get unexpected phenomena, like the art instinct.
********************************
Speaking of evolution, UD notes that Leigh Van Valen, the University of Chicago scientist who originated the Red Queen hypothesis, has died.
Stephen Stearns, in a Yale course on evolution, said this about the Red Queen hypothesis:
[The hypothesis is that] all life on earth is in fact caught up in a coevolutionary web of interactions. And his evidence for that is that the long-term extinction rate is constant. If you look over the Phanerozoic, if you look over the last 550 million years, the probability that a species will go extinct, within a given period of time, has remained roughly constant.
There’s some slight evidence that maybe species have started to live a little bit longer. But, you know, broad brush, this claim is correct. Things have not gotten better at persisting, over the last 500 million years. So in some sense I think Leigh’s claim is probably true. Every time a species on earth tries to get a leg up, some other species compensates. So this is where that term comes from. This is an illustration from Through the Looking Glass by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). This–Alice is a pawn on a chessboard, and Alice is supposed to, in this mental game, march down the chessboard and get turned into a queen, when she reaches the end.
And the Red Queen, who is next to her, says, “Alice, this is a game in which you run as fast as you can and you can only stay in place.” So it’s like one of those nightmares that you have, where you’re running as fast as you possibly can, and you can’t get away. That’s Leigh Van Valen’s metaphor for evolution: everybody is running as hard as they can and they’re just staying in place; their fitness is not long-term improving.
———————————————–
Further intriguing ideas from the conference, these from Pat Metheny:
It’s really all just ideas. Jazz improvisation is a narrative, linguistic experience… You’re dealing with a vocabulary and a language you work to refine in order to say what you mean, to express yourself honestly. Aesthetic success is when communicative flow happens, when a certain engagement happens.
Music is this wild thing – you can’t see it, taste it, smell it. It’s unreal. But it’s so effective as narrative, as basic communication…
What I’m getting at is elusive, and hard to quantify.
The idea exists before the instrument. If you ask me to play Funny Valentine on three different instruments, I’ll play it the same on all of them.
… Art Museum all day, at a Johns Hopkins conference full of people trying to ground aesthetic experience empirically. I’ll let you know if they’re able to do it.
Later this month, scientists, aesthetic theorists, and artists will convene at Johns Hopkins University to talk about the biochemical bases of aesthetic experiences. UD‘s thinking of attending. If she does, she’ll cover it, of course, on this blog.
The meeting’s venue, the American Visionary Art Museum, exhibits a painting by UD‘s old friend, Paul Laffoley. So she could visit one of Paul’s pieces, and listen to interesting things about aesthetics.
Bloomberg describes the art of appraisal.
[Two art] appraisers [attempting to appraise an Anish Kapoor work, Hole and Vessell II,] honed in on two [of his] pieces as the most comparable to [it]… One, Mother as a Ship, which looks like a blue canoe, sold for $321,600. The other, Untitled 1984, which appears to be a red, wall-mounted daisy, went for $142,400. To determine whether Hole and Vessel II was worth more or less than the two other sculptures, the appraisers resorted to their own aesthetic judgments.
The assessments, it turned out, partly hinged on their opinions of the so-called voids, or the concave holes in Kapoor’s work. While the circular opening in Hole and Vessel II is about 1 foot in diameter, similar to the hole in the middle of the daisy in Untitled 1984, the void in Mother as a Ship spans the 7-foot length of the boatlike work. After looking at photos of these sculptures, [one appraiser] surmised that Hole and Vessel II had a lower value, much like Untitled 1984, due partly to their similar voids.
[The other appraiser] disagreed. He said the void in Hole and Vessel II, which he said could be compared to a vagina, helped make the sculpture more sexy than Untitled 1984.
“Isn’t that slightly sensuous?” Brown says. “That means I think the market will go for it.”
He concluded that the cone-shaped sculpture was worth as much as three times the flowerlike work.
You already know that the in vitro guy won the first Nobel of the season (The first Nobel, the angels did say…); you might not know that Zaha Hadid has won the Stirling for her contemporary art museum in Rome.
The quotation in my title comes from Nicolai Ouroussoff, who wrote about the project last November for the New York Times. Although enthusiastic, Ouroussoff worried about the “relentless” “flow of spaces,” and this YouTube (mute the music if it’s not your thing) indeed suggests a problem.
Or maybe not. If the idea of the museum is to convey the idea of contemporaneity, then the fact that Hadid’s building looks and probably feels like an airport makes sense. The postmodern sensibility is distinctly not about stillness, and few contemporary art pieces (certainly not, say, kinetic or performance art) demand the rapt, silent, extended consideration that earlier twentieth century artworks, with their challenging abstractions and collages, for instance, seemed to call for. How much contemplation time are you going to give Barbara Kruger’s I Shop Therefore I Am?
You’re going to enter that museum hopped up, ready to be distracted, amused, and bopped around by its endless hallways and elevators and stairs. You’ll poke your head into this narrow gallery and that, but your main thing will be restless bouncing around.
“Because they kill so many other people, it would be a favor to kill them, understand? Why don’t people in power and in the elite die?” he asked.
Gil Vicente, a Brazilian artist, explains his series of charcoal sketches featuring Vicente assassinating the Queen of England, the Pope, George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Kofi Annan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his country’s leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Various groups in Brazil are unhappy that the series currently hangs in a prominent location as part of a high-profile biennial exhibit in Sao Paolo.
… is up and running, and we’ve been discussing, among other things, bad art.
Even as we carried on our discussion yesterday, this New York Times piece on the subject — with lavish illustrations — appeared.
Here are some of the ways the article describes bad art:
anonymous, strange, clumsy and cheap
created in all seriousness, but clearly something has gone wrong, either in the execution or in the concept
off-kilter paintings (and psyches)
disturbing, yet I can’t seem to look away
Consider one of the paintings, An I for an Eye.
It’s not bad merely because it’s badly painted, its colors flat and loud and inexpressive, its body/tree in awkward juxtaposition with a trunk. It’s bad because it combines a colossal desire to convey something the painter considers a profound truth, with a miniscule ability in fact to convey it.
Again, this is partly because the painter lacks craft. There’s a disconnect between the painter’s thoughts and his hand.
But it is more importantly because the painter lacks insight, clarity, and subtlety in relation to the revelation about the human condition that he wishes to press upon us. His painting fairly pants with philosophical fervor; it wants to provoke an epiphany about life in its viewer. Yet its painstaking, painfully schematic, metaphor, its insulting intellectual dullness — we grow as trees grow, rooted in the soil of the earth, aspiring toward the sun of happiness, and yet in our blindness and shame we produce the fruit of sorrow — communicates only the vapid, overweening self-confidence of its creator.
I suppose this is what makes it good bad art — the intensity of conviction on the part of the painter.
All bad poetry is sincere, said Wilde.
Good bad art is intensely sincere.
In reviewing its art collection, Yale discovers that it might have an early Diego Velázquez instead of the unexceptional whatever it had stashed in the basement.
The painting’s not in good shape. It’s not Yale’s fault; the damage seems to have been done long before a couple of wealthy alumni gave it to the school in the 1920’s. On the other hand, since the piece didn’t seem all that important, Yale had, as I say, sort of stashed it.
Here’s a big reproduction.
[A] portrait of Adolf Hitler at the Marblehead Arts Association was done as part of a young artists exhibit on historical characters. The show included figures from Darth Vader to Vincent van Gogh.
However, the picture of Hitler has offended family members of Holocaust survivors. Susan Fader finds the work insensitive.
“To me, it’s kind of blasphemy and inappropriate… I find it totally unnecessary that I should have to look at something that is still so raw for so many,” said Fader.
To the artist, Gage Delprete, Hitler represents negative role models…
