The Nature of Art
inference-review.com
inference-review.com
>"Each book and exhibition devoted to [Vermeer's] works proves beauty’s corrupting power over scholarly minds."
The author's detachment and lack of value judgement towards the object of study is either admirable or terrifying. I suppose that comes down to the neutrality of science which he admires. Whether the input consists of paintings of Rembrandt or the municipal birth and death records of the town of Ghent during the years 1440-1490, all are equal before science.
> "STRIPPED OF THE inessential matter from which they are made, paintings are just clever patterns of pixels."
Dude - no. That's very much not what paintings are.
Art is about creating accessible representations of psychological/emotional states and experiences. It's all abstraction, even when it's figurative.
Consider how stylised and unrealistic most paintings are. Even the supposed classics of representational accuracy like the Arnolfini portrait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait
The poses, the lighting, the setting, the symbolism of the objects in the scene - they're all abstracted and distorted in unrealistic ways to highlight a message and create an experience.
It wasn't until the 20th century that you started to see very plain photorealistic painting, and it was always a very niche genre. All other art relies on distortion, not accuracy.
So "Woman with pearl earring" -> "Another woman with pearl earring" is missing the point. They're only related in the most superficial ways.
They're both psychological studies, but the content of the Vermeer is much more captivating and ambiguous. Which is why it's famous while the Mieris the Elder isn't.
Expecting a professor of evolutionary biology to understand this is like expecting Andy Warhol to be an expert on mRNA vaccine design. It's pure Dunning-Kruger - someone out of their depth having opinions about something they don't have the first clue about.
The whole thing seemed to be building up to a conclusion that - no, one cannot mechanically reduce the whole of Art History to a matrix of influence coefficients, and here's why... - but no, it died with a whimper on the altar of reductionist positivism. Was the point to "debunk or demystify Art"?
Reading deeper, for myself, I think this strays into the treacherous waters of determinism versus "artistic will". There is no mention of archetypes, synchronicity, metaphor, the transformative nature of art, or that (socio-political function) "all art is propaganda". As you say it tried to "de-psychologise" art.
> Expecting a professor of evolutionary biology to understand this is like expecting Andy Warhol to be an expert on mRNA vaccine design. It's pure Dunning-Kruger - someone out of their depth having opinions about something they don't have the first clue about.
I am not sure that evolutionary biologists shouldn't get to speak on art. This is a strange interregnum we are in, in which, for example: economists presume to speak on all and every matter because in their world "everything is economics". In a specialised world we all know everything there is to know about nothing at all, and so feel frustrated for the "whole and connected" life of mind that once existed.
As a (well read and aging) computer scientist I find myself straying into areas of "expertise" I really have no claim to, but think insights from my field have something to contribute.
The problem comes when claims are made that "evolutionary biology _explains_ X", or that "systems theory _explains_ Y". No it doesn't. It is one viewpoint in a multi-dimensional, multi-causal tapestry of human life and enquiry.
- seems to be the keyword that reveals the depth of ignorance. Limiting painting to what can be done electronically (and hence ignoring all use of pigment) seems to discard a few 100,000years of painting history