mind

All art happens in the theatre of the mind

invention of the photograph

J.M.W. Turner - The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (1834)

Painters, in the business of copying reality, saw the new invention of the camera as a dire threat. How could the human hand compete with the photon? J.M.W. Turner is said to have remarked after seeing a daguerreotype that he was glad he’d already had his day, since the era of painting was now over. But not all artists believed in the inevitable triumph of the camera. The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a natural skeptic of science, reviewed a photographic exhibition in 1859 by proclaiming the limits of the new medium. Its accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even—and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import—a materialist. In Baudelaire’s romantic view, the true duty of photography was “to be the servant of the sciences and arts, but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature. If it photography is allowed to encroach upon the domain of the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s soul, then it will be so much the worse for us.” Baudelaire wanted the modern artist to describe everything that the photograph ignored, “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.”

Inspired by Baudelaire’s writings and the provocative realism of Edouard Manet, a motley group of young French painters decided to rebel. The camera, they believed, was a liar. Its precision was false. Why? Because reality did not consist of static images. Because the camera stops time, which cannot be stopped; because it renders everything in focus, when everything is never in focus. Because the eye is not a lens, and the brain is not a machine.

These rebels called themselves the impressionists. Like the film in a camera, their idiom was light. But the impressionists realized that light was both a dot and a blur. If the camera captured the dot, the impressionists represented the blur. They wanted to capture time in their paintings, showing how a bale of hay changes in the afternoon shadows, or how the smoke of a train leaving Gare Saint-Lazare slowly fades into thin air. As Baudelaire insisted, they painted what the camera left out.

Look, for example, at an early Monet, Impression: Soleil Levant (Impression: Sunrise). Monet painted this hazy scene of the Le Havre harbor in the spring of 1872. An orange sun hangs in a gray sky; a lonely fisherman sails in a sea made of undulating brushstrokes. There is little here for the eye to see. Monet is not interested in the ships, or in their billowing sails, or in the glassy water. He ignores all the static things a photograph would detect. Instead, Monet is interested in the moment, in its transience, in his impression of its transience. His mood is mixed in with the paint, his subjectivity muddled with the facts of his sensations. This, he seems to he saying, is a scene no photograph could catch.

- Jonah Lehrer

abstraction becomes the new realism

Ingres - Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (1806)

It is not easy to change the definition of reality. At the 1910 exhibition, Cezanne’s paintings were denounced in the press as “being of no interest except for the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality?” Cezanne, the critics declared, was literally insane. His art was nothing more than an ugly untruth, a deliberate distortion of nature. The academic style of painting, with its emphasis on accurate details and fine-grained verisimilitude, refused to fade away.

This conservative aesthetic had scientific roots. The psychology of the time continued to see our senses as perfect reflections of the outside world. The eye was like a camera: it collected pixels of light and sent them passively on to the brain. The founder of this psychology was the eminent experimentalist William Wundt, who insisted that every sensation could be broken down into its simpler sense data. Science could peel back the layers of consciousness and reveal the honest stimuli underneath.

Cezanne inverted this view of vision. His paintings were about the subjectivity of sight, the illusion of surfaces. Cezanne invented postimpressionism because the impressionists just weren’t strange enough. “What I am trying to translate” Cezanne said, “is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being.” Monet and Renoir and Degas believed that sight was simply the sum of its light. In their pretty paintings they wanted to describe the fleeting photons absorbed by the eye, to describe nature entirely in terms of its illumination. But Cezanne believed that light was only the beginning of seeing. “The eye is not enough,” he declared. “One needs to think as well.” Cezanne’s epiphany was that our impressions require interpretation; to look is to create what you see.

We now know that Cezanne was right. Our vision begins with photons, but this is only the beginning. Whenever we open our eyes, the brain engages in an act of astonishing imagination, as it transforms the residues of light into a world of form and space that we can understand. By probing inside the skull, scientists can see how our sensations are created, how the cells of the visual cortex silently construct sight. Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.

Cezanne’s art exposes the process of seeing. Although his paintings were criticized for being unnecessarily abstract—even the impressionists ridiculed his technique—they actually show us the world as it first appears to the brain. A Cezanne picture has no boundaries or stark black lines separating one thing from the next. Instead, there are only strokes of paint, and places on the canvas where one color, knotted on the surface, seems to change into another color. This is the start of vision: it is what reality looks like before it has been resolved by the brain. The light has not yet been made into form.

But Cezanne did not stop there. That would have been too easy. Even as his art celebrates its strangeness, it remains loyal to what it represents. As a result, we can always recognize Cezanne’s subjects. Because he gives the brain just enough information, viewers are able to decipher his paintings and rescue the picture from the edge of obscurity. (His forms might be fragile, but they are never incoherent.) The layers of brushstrokes, so precise in their ambiguity, become a bowl of peaches, or a granite mountain, or a self-portrait.

This is Cezanne’s genius: he forces us to see, in the same static canvas, the beginning and the end of our sight. What starts as an abstract mosaic of color becomes a realistic description. The painting emerges, not from the paint or the light, but from somewhere inside our mind. We have entered into the work of art: its strangeness is our own.

- Jonah Lehrer

cooking is a science and an art

The individuality of our experiences is what science will never be able to solve. The individuality of taste, which is, in a way, the only aspect of taste that really matters, cannot be explained by science. The subjective experience is irreducible. Cooking is a science and an art. As the chef Mario Batalj once said about one of his recipes, “If it works, it is true.”

status signaling

Jan Christensen - You Can't Afford This (2010)

atonality through tonality

Petrushka was Stravinsky’s first major work to follow in the brazen path of Schoenberg’s avant-garde. But Stravinsky; unlike Schoenberg, did not undermine tonality by erasing it. He worried that atonality was too stifling, and that Schoenberg, with all his “rationalism and rules” might end up becoming “a dolled-up Brahms.” Instead, Stravinsky decided to torment his audience by making it overdose on tonality; In Petrushka, a Diaghilev ballet about a puppet who comes to life, Stravinsky took two old folk melodies and set them against each other, like wind-up dolls. As a result, the music is bitonal, unfolding in two keys (F-sharp major, which is almost all black keys, and C major, which is all white keys) simultaneously. The result is unresolved ambiguity, the ironic dissonance of too much consonance. The ear must choose what to hear.

- Jonah Lehrer

where science fails, art can succeed

Today’s culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can’t be quantified or calculated, then it can’t be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world, (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

...Not every question is best answered in terms of quantum physics. When some things are broken apart, they are just broken. What the artists in this book reveal is that there are many different ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth. Physics is useful for describing quarks and galaxies, neuroscience is useful for describing the brain, and art is useful for describing our actual experience. As Robert Frost wrote, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

A poem can be just as true and useful as the laboratory. While science will always be our primary method of investigating the universe, it is naive to think that science can solve everything by itself, or that everything can even be solved. One of the ironies of modern science is that some of its most profound discoveries like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle*, or the emergent nature of consciousness are actually about the limits of science. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist, once put it, “The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery.”

We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.

But before we can get to this intersection, two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call and not ignore science’s inspiring descriptions of reality. Every humanist should read Nature.

At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. That simple idea will be the starting premise of any fourth culture. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science, wrote, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority beyond the reach of criticism.”

*This principle of quantum physics states that one can know either the position of a particle or its momentum (mass times velocity), but not both variables simultaneously. In other words, we Can’t know everything about anything.

- Jonah Lehrer