My Art and Wine

[Dinesh]

If I had to provide an answer to the question, it would be "Art is a mystery."

I would accept this as a working solution to artists themselves. It seems to me there are three species at work here, perhaps distinct. You have the artists themselves who do "art", you have those who consider themselves "artists" because of some perception of public appreciation. You tell people you're an artist and there is this perception that you have a sensitive soul and a deep penetrating understanding of nature or some such. Finally, you have the Art Collector, who apparently, collects art because that also raises his/her social status. It seems to me that this sort of thing is happening in holography where holographers collect holograms from a bygone era simply because it was done by a famous/well known holograper - it raises their social status within the group because they own a Rudy Berkhout, or some such holographer. I ask artists why people pay millions of dollars for a picture of a bunch of cows grazing in a field and they simply shake their heads and say something to the fact the collectors drive up the price. I think the artists themselves, who actually do art, do it because it's a mystery. They seem to have no idea how something will work out. I have a cousin who's an artist. She was offered a large-ish sum for one of her works and she turned the seller down. "Why", I asked and she replied "because it's part of me. It's unique". I couldn't see how it was "unique" because if she could do it once, surely she could do it again? Apparently not so! She told me that whatever "forces" caused that particular piece of art to "come out" was very tied in to the emotional state, her physical state and her frame of mind; it was impossible to recreate unless she recreated her entire mind and body. I'm not sure I completely understand this, but I'll accept the "mystery" of it as a part explanation.

Dinesh, you once mentioned that science and art are two completely different things, not to be reconciled or mixed.

...imagine doing a scientific experiment, then rejecting certain results because they were aesthetically displeasing.

Yet, several scientists speak of the beauty or elegance of scientific theories and give this as a reason for working on a certain theory or mathematical expression and not another one.

Well, what I meant was that the frame of mind seems to be completely different. The scientist seeks some sort of understanding of natural phenomena, simply because the natural phenomena is there and therefore needs an explanation. So, this progresses from "What is a cloud", to "Why are clouds white", to "Why are clouds grey just before it rains", to "What is the shape of a raindrop". Now, it seems to me that artists have a very different reaction to the same phenomena. The artists seem not to care objectively about the colour or shape of a cloud or a raindrop; instead, they seem to ask, "I feel some sort of emotional reaction to the cloud. Is there a way to encapsulate or transfer that emotional reaction? Is there a sort of 'essence' of a cloud that I can capture? It's beauty perhaps? It's 'fluffiness' maybe" So, in the one case, you have an objective and detailed study of specific properties taken apart piece by piece and in the other you have overall impressions taken holistically. In the end, the purpose of science is to break down all phenomena into a very few basic set of laws which you can then apply to all phenomena universally, whereas the purpose (if any) of art is to uniquely identify every phenomena and capture it's uniqueness - there can be no (or very few) generalised basic laws. I've said elsewhere that my perception of art is that it's a narrative told in someone's unique perspective and, furthermore, that narrative is altered by the teller's emotional state. The tale is never the same twice.

However, having said this, scientists are also prey to their own humanity. So, yes, there have been scientific experiments in which results have been rejected because they were disliked (or rather, dismissed because they didn't fit with the scientists hypothesis). One of the most famous ones is the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment to find the charge/mass ratio of the electron. Millikan's original papers show that he did not include some results because they didn't fit with his hypothesis. But, natural processes occur completely independently of our mind set or our emotional state - nature does not care what we "feel" about the fact that clouds are white - science and scientists have sought to eliminate the human factor as far as possible. This has given rise to the Scientific Method" of peer review and repeatability of experiments. This method has promoted Millikan's thesis and rejected cold fusion. I cannot imagine any method of art in which such care is given to rejecting the human factor!

To DJM's point of the elegance of a theory, this too is a purely human factor. We believe that nature must be simple in it's essence and elegant in it's representations. This may well be something we inherited from the Greeks ("Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty"). There is a philosophical subject of epistemology which seeks to look inward and ask question such as, "Is nature simple?" and "What is the connection between simplicity and truth". To that end, scientists are awed by the fact that nature does seem to be very simple. For the everyday phenomena that we observe, every single motion in all the universe is explained by Newton's 2nd law. F=ma. A simple linear equation and it explains everything! Even relativistically and quantum mechanically, all of nature seems to be explainable by simple mathematical equations - and then, only a few of them. So, you get to wonder, "Why is nature mathematical at it's very core?" Poincare tried to answer this. Dirac, in a sense, simply gave up and said, "God is a mathematician of very high order". There is a story that Einstein was giving a class when the confirmation of his General Theory of Relativity came to him in a telegram. He tossed the telegram to a student and remarked, "You may be interested in this". The student was taken aback by Einstein's seemingly lack of excitement and asked what Einstein would have done if the experiment had disproved the theory. Einstein said, "Then I should feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is too beautiful to be wrong".

I think the point here is that this sense of simplicity is a basic building block of science. We check ourselves constantly against this particular metric. I think art is holistic and so there can be almost no general principles that apply to the entire world of art.

[Tony DCG]

Great discussion

If you also recall from the TED talks the speaker mentioned that art is buying not just the piece but also the story. He talked about the very young girl in Colorado who made beautiful paintings (she was on 60 minutes I think). These were selling for thousands of dollars. Well it turned out that her dad was “coaching” her though each piece and the paintings were all of a sudden worth nothing. Same paintings.
We were at the Louve some months ago and of coarse there were piles of people clustered to see the Mona Lisa, IMO there were thousand of pieces that were equal if not better than that piece (not saying it is not beuatiful)
And of course the stories of forgery’s.
I image if there was a 3 year old albino child making holograms it would be well recieved.

[Dinesh]

It's not just paintings. People seem to feel the need to belong to a particular social group and like what they like and dislike what they dislike, a form of "art tribalism", I suppose. It's not just paintings, you see the same thing in cinema. Everyone says that "the best film ever made" is Citizen Kane. Yet, if you ask, "Why?", they seem flabbergasted as if to say, "What d'you mean 'Why'. It just is. That's all!" Sometimes when people tell me that Citizen Kane is the "best film ever made", I ask them what they think of that car riding scene where he's carrying on a conversation inside a car. They say that it was great, just as it should be in the "best film ever made". There is no car riding scene. Sometimes I even say, "Rosebud was that toy rocking horse, right?" and they agree with me! I've even asked several times which holograms people dislike, and usually get no answer. If they like every hologram ever made (or certainly made between 1965 and 1980), then where's the discernment? Very few people like every movie they ever saw, or every food item they ever ate. I think that what you dislike defines you as much as what you like.

Actually, C. P. Snow wrote the book "The Two Cultures", where he writes that ignorance of art is seen as socially undesirable, while ignorance of the most basic aspects of science and mathematics is socially very attractive. He makes the example that if you didn't recognise, say, "To be or not to be" as a Shakespeare sonnet, you'd be labelled an ignorant lout. However, you can proudly say, "I never understood math" or proudly proclaim that you have no clue what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, and people would still see you as knowledgeable and refined.

I image if there was a 3 year old albino child making holograms it would be well recieved.

So long as it wasn't discovered that dad was actually making the holograms.