From 2008 to 2013, Art & Document was the voice of the Center for Documentary Arts, a nonprofit project founded by Timothy Cahill at the Sage Colleges of upstate New York. Situated at the crossroads of art, ethics, faith, and conscience, the blog continues the Center's mission to present artists, writers, and thinkers who, in their lives and works, partake of the sacred, bear witness to suffering, and manifest beauty, dignity, and charity.

05 May 2012

This stuff called art



The tent on Randalls Island, NYC, containing the art fair Frieze New York, which Holland Cotter describes as, "nearly 180 galleries, along with restaurants, bars, V.I.P. lounges, an auditorium and a bookstore." Cotter's review in the NYT includes a rather deflated account of what he calls the "gentrification of contemporary art": 
Part one is about a 20th-century model of an avant-garde, with artists as feisty cultural delinquents and idiot savants who set themselves outside the mainstream to make baffling things and think deep thoughts. 
In part two, set in the 21st century, the model has changed. Now artists, whether they know it or not, are worker bees in an art-industrial hive. Directed by dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants, they turn out predictable product for high-profile, high-volume fairs like Frieze.
I wish I were free to attend this event. I am not at all sure what the move from gallery to fair means for the future of art. I don't think anyone is. The crowds that fill the tent at Frieze and the other huge fairs (Basel, Miami, Maastricht, Dubai ... )  bring to mind the Paris Salon at its height in the nineteenth century, when going to the official painting exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts was the cultural equivalent of a new Harry Potter movie, the Super Bowl, and the Whitney Biennial rolled into one. It was the artists who didn't make it into the Salon, or those who rejected its principles, who would change the history of art. That said, Manet showed in the Salon, as did Chardin, Delacroix, Courbet, and Millet before him. History's lessons are generally ambivalent. 


As is Holland Cotter, as he ends his notice of the Randalls Island fair:


" . . . tickets for admission to New York Frieze are available only online. This effectively denies entry to anyone without computer access, which means a not-small number of New Yorkers. Outside, after I saw the fair, I thought of the poor, the crazy and the criminal who once, whether they wanted to or not, called Randalls Island home. Their ghosts must be looking at that big white worm of a tent, at the Wall Street suits, and at this stuff called art that you can do nothing with but buy and sell, with wondering distrust. I’m looking at it all that way myself.

02 May 2012

Group dynamics




Biologist, conservationist, myrmecologist, Pulitzer prize winner, and evolutionary philosopher E. O. Wilson is among the growing number of scientists to have entered the intellectual arena of explaining art, ethics, religion, and even our sense of wonder as essentially scientific phenomena. Wilson interprets rapidly advancing research in a wide array of the sciences, including anthropology, genetics, and neurobiology as offering compelling new insights into the source of our humanity. His thoughtful essay in the current issue of Harvard Magazine explores a number of these subjects, offering fascinating empirical conjecture on a diverse array of subjects, from the origins of music to why we like houses that look down on water. My favorite paragraph is this, in which sociobiologist Wilson offers an evolutionary explanation on why humans seem wired for both compassionate cooperation and destructive conflict:


Substantial evidence now exists that human social behavior arose genetically by multilevel evolution. If this interpretation is correct, and a growing number of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists believe it is, we can expect a continuing conflict between components of behavior favored by individual selection and those favored by group selection. Selection at the individual level tends to create competitiveness and selfish behavior among group members—in status, mating, and the securing of resources. In opposition, selection between groups tends to create selfless behavior, expressed in greater generosity and altruism, which in turn promote stronger cohesion and strength of the group as a whole.


While science has long been evoked as the basis of destructive social engineering, there has emerged lately a less domineering application of the sciences on matters of social instincts. This new science, born of advanced understanding of genetics and brain science, is ripe with possibilities to rewrite our collective script on the primacy of  human selfishness, just as research on mirror neurons has suggested that empathy is hard-wired via evolution. Wilson does not speculate on what seems the next logical level of inquiry, that is, to determine if group selection represents a later and higher level of brain function.  As our cognitive abilities advanced, did they influence our capacities for positive group dynamics? From a humanitarian perspective this is a hopeful thought, but it could also be wishful thinking. Dadaism, the anti-art movement created in the midst of World War I, grew out of dismay at that war's carnage and disgust toward the claims of so-called "civilization."  If the same humanity that produced Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Chartres, they reasoned, could also conceive of trench warfare, poison gas, and aerial bombing, then there was no reason to believe Homo sapiens—individually or in groups—was anything but fundamentally  barbarous.  Wilson also comments on the confusion created by two antithetical evolutionary imperatives:



An inevitable result of the mutually offsetting forces of multilevel selection is permanent ambiguity in the individual human mind, leading to countless scenarios among people in the way they bond, love, affiliate, betray, share, sacrifice, steal, deceive, redeem, punish, appeal, and adjudicate. The struggle endemic to each person’s brain, mirrored in the vast superstructure of cultural evolution, is the fountainhead of the humanities.


Wilson's essay considers a way to reconcile the persistent divide between science and the humanities, a gulf that only grows wider as scientific research is based increasingly on mathematical computations. This is true even in a discipline like biology, which one might assume is based essentially on direct observation. In many cases, the sciences, at the level where their most profound truths are revealed, are conducted in a language most of us cannot hope to understand. Nevertheless, Wilson reminds us of the common ground shared by the arts and sciences. "Innovators in both . . . domains are basically dreamers and storytellers," he writes. "In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story." That road rapidly forks off, however, Wilson concedes:  "The essential difference between literary and scientific style is the use of metaphor." The power of creative comparison has minimal value in science, but is the essence of the arts. Wilson, who has penned a novel in addition to his many other achievements, knows what he's talking about. "Lyrical expression," he writes, "is a device to communicate emotional feeling directly from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader." 


Wilson ends his essay with an intriguing rumination on the biological basis of music:


Was music Darwinian? Did it have survival value for the Paleolithic tribes that practiced it? Examining the customs of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures from around the world, one can hardly come to any other conclusion. . . . The musical compositions of modern hunter-gatherers generally serve basically as tools that invigorate their lives. . . .


To create and perform music is a human instinct. It is one of the true universals of our species. To take an extreme example, the neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel points to the Pirahã, a small tribe in the Brazilian Amazon: “Members of this culture speak a language without numbers or a concept of counting. Their language has no fixed terms for colors. They have no creation myths, and they do not draw, aside from simple stick figures. Yet they have music in abundance, in the form of songs.”


Patel has referred to music as a “transformative technology.” To the same degree as literacy and language itself, it has changed the way people see the world. Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex. Music is powerful in its impact on human feeling and on the interpretation of events. It is extraordinarily complex in the neural circuits it employs, appearing to elicit emotion in at least six different brain mechanisms.

It is my hope the excerpts here will whet your appetite for the entire essay, which is well worth reading. Equally as interesting are the comments afterward, in which the Harvard community, never one to be cowed by a man's prestige, argues with nearly all of Wilson's opinions and assertions.

Thanks to Maria Popova and her ever-inspiring Brain Pickings, which put me on to Wilson's essay. Portrait of Wilson by Jim Harrison

Giotto's Kiss

I'm thinking on this day before Christmas about  Giotto's depiction of the reunion of Joachim and Anne, Mary's parents, at the G...