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

how to read poetry

All meaning depends on the key of interpretation.

- T.S. Eliot

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

political propaganda

a new church of revolutionary virtue

Jacques-Louis David - Death of Marat (1793)

political propaganda - modern

Confident yet grounded. Decisive, yet trustworthy.

political propaganda

Dignified, yet humble. Peacemaker, yet despot.

a tax collector and his wife

we're the right kind of people to govern you.

Jacques-Louis David - Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1788)

what his patrons wanted

"to signal wealth, without the appearance of signaling wealth"

Rembrant - Portrait of Johannes Wtenbogaert (1633)

art of the 20th century

The beauty of Provocation and the beauty of Consumption.

Man Ray - Venus Restored (1936)

Vogue: Paris (1995)

baroque art

In the twilight of Renaissance civilization, a significant idea began to gain ground: Beauty did not so much spring from balanced proportion. but from a sort of torsion, a restless reaching out for something lying beyond the mathematical rules that govern the physical world. Hence Renaissance equilibrium was followed by the restless agitation of Mannerism. But for this change to occur in the arts, the world had to be seen as less ordered and geometrically obvious. Ptolemy’s model of the universe: based on the perfection of the circle, seemed to embody the Classical ideals of proportion. Even Galileo’s model, in which the earth was shifted from the center of the universe and made to revolve around the sun, did not disturb this most ancient idea of the perfection of the spheres: But with Kepler’s planetary model, in which the earth revolves along an ellipse of which the sun is one of the foci, this image of spherical perfection was thrown into crisis. This was not because Kepler’s model of the cosmos did not obey mathematical laws, but because a visual sense no longer resembled the “Pythagorean” perfection of a system of concentric spheres.

- Umberto Eco

ego as inauthenticity

...Sartre said the meaning of death is that “the for-itself is changed forever into an in-itself that has slipped entirely into the past.” Turns out the “for-itself” is Jean-Paul’s term for human consciousness, which he tells us is called “for-itself” because it is not a thing. If it were a thing, it would be an “in-itself.” What Sartre means is that human beings have no “essence,” no predetermined purpose like, say, a rubber ducky does. “In themselves” human beings are nothing; rubber duckies, on the other hand, are quite something, as anyone who’s ever been stuck in a bathtub for three hours can attest. Sartre thinks a key difference between human beings and the duckies is that we humans invent our own essence by choosing to be what we want to be. There are other differences too, of course. But we humans are for ourselves, self-created, rather than in ourselves, created for a fixed purpose.

Or at least that’s the way we ought to be—always freely reinventing ourselves. But, alas, most of us have this nasty habit of wanting to be a thing—no, not a table-thing or a wall-lamp-thing or a bathtub-thing, but a human-role-thing, like dissolving our identity into our profession or our nationality or our reputation on the golf course. In this way, we slip into inauthenticity, a kind of living death, like Sartre’s famous waiter, who thinks that waiterhood actually defines his essence. Silly garcon. He fails to see that the possibility of freedom—the possibility to transcend what he’s become—is always there.

Until he really dies, that is. At that point, we all become things. Then we do have a stamped-on essence: to wit, the essence of dead meat.

- Thomas Cathcort

How It Happens

The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

I thought you

were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many

are clinging to that

I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said

I am the only chance I have

then the sky did not answer

and here we are

with our names for the days

the vast days that do not listen to us

— W.S. MERWIN

remember, you're going to die!

Frans Hals - Youth with a Skull (1628)

As you are now, I once was; as I am now, you will be

beauty and the sublime

Beauty is that which produces a pleasure that does not necessarily engender a desire to possess or consume the thing that pleases. The horror bound up with the Sublime is the horror of something that cannot possess us and cannot harm us. In this lies the deep relationship between Beauty and the Sublime.

Kant distinguishes between two sorts of Sublime, the mathematical and the dynamic variety. A typical example of the mathematical Sublime is the sight of the starry sky. Here we have the impression that what we see goes far beyond our sensibilities and we are thus induced to imagine more than we see. We are led to this because our reason (the faculty that leads us to conceive ideas such as God, the world, or freedom, which our intellect cannot demonstrate) induces us to postulate an infinity that is not only beyond the grasp of our senses but also beyond the reach of our imagination, which cannot manage to harness it to a single intuition.

A typical example of the dynamic Sublime is the sight of a storm. Here, what shakes our spirit is not the impression of infinite vastness, but of infinite power: in this case, too, our sensible nature is left humiliated and, again, this is a source of a feeling of unease, compensated for by the sense of our moral greatness, against which the forces of nature are powerless.

- Umberto Eco

Caspar David Friedrich - The Moon Rising over the Sea (1822)

gold as beauty, light as beauty

Fra Angelico - The Coronation of the Virgin (1435)

If you take away the light all things remain unknown in the shadows, since they cannot manifest their own Beauty. Light, therefore is the Beauty and the order of all visible creatures.

- Robert Grosseteste (1250)

beauty is polytheistic now

An explorer from the future will no longer be able to identify the aesthetic ideal diffused by the mass media of the twentieth century and beyond. He will have to surrender before the orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism, and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty.

with anxiety comes abstraction

....Whence this anxiety, this restlessness, this continuous search for novelty? If we take a look at the knowledge of the time, we can find a general answer in the “narcissistic wound” inflicted on the humanist ego by the Copernican revolution and successive developments in physics and astronomy. Man’s dismay on discovering that he had lost the center of the universe was accompanied by the decline of humanist and Renaissance utopias regarding the possibility of constructing a pacified and harmonious world. Political crises, economic revolutions, the wars of the “iron century,” the return of the plague: everything concurred in reinforcing the discovery that the universe had not been specifically tailored for humanity, and that man was neither its artifice, nor its master.

Paradoxically, it was the enormous progress of knowledge that caused this very crisis of knowledge the search for an evermore complex Beauty was accompanied, for example, by Johannes Kepler’s discovery that celestial laws do not follow simple Classical harmonies, but require a steadily growing complexity

- Umberto Eco

Andreas Cellarius - Harmonia macrocosmica (1660)

With crisis in knowledge, realism shifts to new forms of abstraction:

Francesco Borromini - Cupola di san Carlo alle quattro fontane

mannerism

Toward the end of the Renaissance, calculability and measurability ceased to be the criteria of objectivity and they were reduced to mere instruments for the creation of steadily more complex ways of representing space that brought about a suspension of proportionate order. It is no accident that a full understanding of the value of Mannerism did not come along until modern times: if Beauty is deprived of criteria of measure, order, and proportion, it is inevitably destined to fuzzy, subjective criteria of judgment. An emblematic example of this trend is Arcimboldo, an artist considered minor and marginal in Italy, who enjoyed fame and success at the court of the Hapsburgs. His surprising compositions, his portraits, in which the faces are composed of objects (fruit, vegetables, and so on) delight and amuse viewers. The Beauty of Arcimboldo is stripped of all appearances of Classicism and is expressed through surprise and wit. Arcimboldo shows that even a carrot can be beautiful: but at the same time he portrays a Beauty that is such, not by virtue of an objective rule, but only thanks to the consensus of the public, of the “public opinion” of the court.

Giuseppe Archimboldo - Summer (1573)

The distinction between proportion and disproportion no longer held, while the same applied to that between form and formless, visible and invisible: the representation of the formless, the invisible, and the vague transcended the opposition between beautiful and ugly, true and false. The representation of Beauty grew in complexity, artists appealed to the imagination more than the intellect, giving themselves new rules on their own initiative.

Mannerist Beauty expresses a thinly veiled conflict within the soul: it is a refined, cultured, and cosmopolitan Beauty, like the aristocracy that appreciated it and commissioned its works (whereas the Baroque was to have more popular and emotional features). Mannerism opposed the strict rules of the Renaissance, but rejected the unrestrained dynamism of Baroque figures; it looks superficial, but it cultivated this superficiality with a study of anatomy and a deepening of the relationship with the Ancients that went beyond similar tendencies during the Renaissance: in short, it outstripped and deepened the Renaissance at the same time.

- Umberto Eco

Correggio - Jupiter and Io (1530)

art as subjectivity and as status-signaling

Giovanni Paolo Pannini - Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome (1758)

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. To seek in the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes. It is very natural, and even quite necessary to extend this axiom to mental, as well as bodily taste; and thus common sense, which is so often at variance with philosophy, especially with the skeptical kind, is found, in one instance at least, to agree in pronouncing the same decision.

- David Hume

decadence as art

I am the Empire in the last of its decline,
That sees the tall, fair-haired Barbarians pass, the while
Composing indolent acrostics, in a style
Of gold, with languid sunshine dancing in each line.

Of death, perchance! Alas, so lagging in desire!
Ah, all is drunk! Bathyllus, hast done laughing, pray?
Ah, all is drunk,--all eaten! Nothing more to say!

Paul Verlaine - Decay (1883)

Thomas Couture - The Romans of the Decadence (1847)