"The neurological basis of artistic universals"

I heard V.S. S. Ramachandran discuss this on UCTV and thought it was interesting. Essentially - many of the compositional techniques artists use are described as having evolutionary/neurological reasons/effects.

A clip:

There are hundreds of types of art; Classical Greek art, Tibetan art, Khmer art, Chola bronzes, Renaissance art, impressionism, expressionism, cubism, fauvism, abstract art; the list is endless. But despite this staggering diversity of styles, are there some general principles or "artistic universals" that cut across cultural boundaries? Can we come up with a "science of Art"? Science and art seem like such fundamentally antithetical pursuits; one is a quest for general principles whereas the other is a celebration of human individuality — so that the very notion of a "science of art" seems like an oxymoron. Yet that’s what I will suggest in this chapter — that our knowledge of human vision and of the brain is now sophisticated enough that we can speculate intelligently on the neural basis of art and maybe begin to construct a scientific theory of artistic experience. Saying this, as we shall see, does not in any way detract from the originality of the individual artist, for the manner in which she deploys these universal principles is entirely up to her. (After all, knowing the rules of grammar does not diminish our appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius!)

There are other problems too. What, if any, is the key difference between "kitsch" art and the real thing? Some would argue that what’s kitsch for one person might be high art for another — that the judgment is entirely subjective. objectively distinguish the kitsch from the real, how complete is that theory and in what sense can we claim to have really understood the meaning of art? One reason for thinking that there’s a genuine difference is that one can "mature" into liking real art after having once enjoyed kitsch, but it’s virtually impossible to slide back into kitsch from having once known the delights of high art. Yet the difference between the two remains tantalizingly elusive. I speculate here on the possibility that real art involves the "proper" and effective deployment of certain artistic universals, whereas kitsch merely goes through the motions — as if to make a mockery of the principles without a genuine gut-level understanding of them....

To assert that there might be universals in art does not in any way diminish the important role of culture in the creation and appreciation of art. Indeed if this weren’t true there wouldn’t be different styles of art - Renaissance, impressionism, cubism, Indian art, etc. As a scientist, though, my interest is not in the differences between different artistic styles but in principles that cut across cultural barriers.

Here is a tentative list of my ten laws of art:

1) Peak shift
2) Grouping
3) Contrast
4) Isolation
5) Perceptual problem solving
6) Symmetry
7) Abhorrence of coincidences/generic viewpoint
8) Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
9) Balance
10) Metaphor

But it isn’t enough to just list these laws or describe them in detail; we need a coherent biological perspective for thinking about them. In particular, when exploring any universal human trait such as humor, music, art, language we need to keep in mind three basic questions — roughly speaking what, why and how. First, what is the internal logical structure of the particular trait you are looking at (corresponding roughly to what I call laws)? Second, why does the particular trait have the logical structure it does? What is the biological function it evolved for? Third, how is the trait or law mediated by the neural machinery in the brain?

Let me illustrate with a concrete example — the law of "grouping" discovered by the Gestalt psychologists around the turn of the century. Figure 4 shows a striking example of this. All you see at first is a set of random splotches, but after several seconds you start grouping some of the splotches together and start seeing a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground. The brain "glues" the dog-splotches together to form a single object and you get an internal "Aha!" sensation as if you have just solved a problem. In short, the grouping feels good.

.........For a detailed analysis, I refer you to my forthcoming book The Artful Brain. This text is an edited extract of Chapter 4.

(A previous essay about the Eight Laws was published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, 1999: Art and the Brain, ed. J. Goguen.)

Art and Anti-art and Aesthetics

If you want to break all the rules of the artistic tradition, Duchamp reasoned, why not begin by discarding its most fundamental values: beauty and artisanship. The readymades were Duchamp’s answer to the question, How can one make works of art that are not “of art”?

I've been studying aesthetics and I've been noticing how many aestheticians/philosophers of art want to make room in their definition of art for Duchamp's readymades and other Dada type of things.

Duchamp had become well known in the US based on his cubist Nude Descending a Stairway - shown at the Armory Show in NYC. Which had seemed quite revolutionary at the time. (He had tried to exhibit it at the Cubist Salon des Indépendants in Paris but was asked to remove it because of the title? - apparently other cubists felt "mocked").

Dada had gotten going in Europe as a reaction to WWI - the artists were quite fed up with what their society was doing. (It's interesting to consider that in light of the Iraq occupation and what seems to be the motivations of our current politicians - namely Bush, Cheney, etc.)

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction"

I don't think that war is "logical" - and when the vast majority of people are left with little power - and the only power artists have is the images that they make - Dada makes about as much sense as a reaction to what was going on as anything.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art" in the sense that Dadaists protested against the contemporary academic and cultured values of art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

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Duchamp and Dada are most often connected by his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. The Independent Artists shows were unjuried and all pieces that were submitted were displayed. However, the show committee said that Fountain was not art and rejected it from the show causing an uproar amongst the Dadaists and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.

What doesn't make sense to me is the idea that aestheticians ever felt the need to include "anti-art" in their definitions of art.

Of course it ended up being the aristocrats or bourgeois or both who supported the new trends in art - the "anti-art" which became "art". While most everyone else didn't find much sense in it.

Duchamp, meanwhile, fell into obscurity and played chess. It was Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and such astists in the 50s who resurrected Duchamp and put him on the pedestal that he has been on.

I've been going through an Art History book's 2nd edition to see what was dropped from the new 3rd edition. One of the things was Duchamp's 1923 piece (that he worked on for 8 years) Large Glass "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even". An image which looks like this:

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This image gives one a better sense of the piece that is made out of wire, paint, mirror plating, foil, dust:


In the long run, I think his Large Glass with the idea of showing that which is invisible is a much more interesting piece than his Fountain. It will remain to be seen how all this goes in the future, how Duchamp fares, how art continues to be redefined...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the place to see Duchamps. At least the Nude... the Large Glass, and some of his other works. The IU Art Museum (Bloomington, IN) has a collection of his readymades.