I have often been asked the reason why I titled New York Biennale of Art “All that is solid melts into the air”, and still more what immaterialism stands for. The first answer comes from the pleasure in provoking, in a paradox à la Niels Bohr. To sponsor immaterialism, I chose Karl Marx — father of immaterialism — with one of his less known and less renowned, yet most intriguing, quotations. I do not mean of course to canonize him, nor suggest re-reading him with any Barkley’s approach, but I think he could help us adopt a new secular, non-metaphysic view on immaterialism, which grounds and fills our life. The second answer is the attempt to go beyond an obsolete view of art history, by going beyond mechanic ways of thinking that belong to the age-old industrial society, in order to single out and share the cognitive strategies needed to avoid concept conditioning and aesthetic constraints, which are historically rooted in science and art. All this with the aim to attain a new course within cultural and social history, which basically matches the development of the rising economics of knowledge. Nowadays numerous critics and fine art scholars do not question themselves seriously. They simply record events, afraid of being trivial or in doubt as to whether it is possible even to speak about art after Impressionism.
Rosenberg wrote: “Avant-garde audience is open to anything. Its keen members rush to organize exhibitions and to supply illustrative labels ages before colors have dried on canvases, or plastic caked. Critics help in this by nosing into essays like bloodhounds, ready to discover the art of the future and to take initiative, as well as build reputations. Art critics are always on the alert, camera and scrap-book in their hands, to be all-sure they won't miss to note down any detail. The tradition of the new has cut down all traditions and ordinariness”.
Theoretically speaking, art history has so far engaged with the classical dynamics of a man mastering and measuring things scattered through a universal space, which otherwise would be incomprehensible and unfathomable.
The world is a huge, insane mass of molecules standing in the space, according to partly-known laws; molecules turn into objects, objects feature shapes and colors, then grow old, die down and regenerate in a cycle complying with utterly autonomous principles.
Nature is order.
We inherited Plato's teaching: a divine being has drawn the universe out of disorder and brought it to order, and has founded the realm of shapes and geometrical proportions. The world is mathematically ordered: science people commit to discover its ruling laws, artists to represent it. And even when he brooded upon microscopic levels, he considered them as miniature copies of macroscopic clones.
As we know, however, according to the current interpretations of scientific discoveries, it is quantum mechanics laws that really matter.
Yet I start by saying that I hate “-isms” and art history framed in movements. I suggest a research trend, a convergence panorama, a critical and creative approach to break up any interpretation frame.
We are currently undergoing a crisis age, which is moving from a social, economic and cultural system centered upon materialistic values, upon a binary system of ultimatums towards a completely different one. Awareness or fear of such a statement grows and grows every passing day.
Art, along with science, philosophy, economics and politics pursue a crucial mission: to promote the establishment of a knowledge society featuring new cultural, ethic and social values, by breaking up the current ones, subject as they are to a material view of man and his life. If we analyze the real processes ongoing, we will find out that the future is part of our everyday life, even if we are still unaware of that.
We are driving a brain-controlled spaceship, and keep looking for control-stick, brake and accelerator!
Let us meditate upon different fields.
SCIENCE
Quantum physics discoveries in science have revolutionized our way of thinking.
At the moment of its creation, all matter includes a double nature: both particle and wave, it depends on the way you decide to measure it. Matter's double nature results from the interactions with matter itself, rather than a sort of intrinsic property of a reality endowed with an objective, autonomous existence.
“Within physical reality, virtual states are part of the realm of potentials, for they include the future empiric possibilities of universe”.
To solve several thermodynamic problems, Max Planck presumed that energy exchanges only take place in small discontinuous particles, quanta — energy clusters which can be divided no further. It is an innovation not to be underrated: since then all physical processes had been considered continuous and gradual. Planck found out that Leibniz was wrong — “natura facit saltus”. A consequence of leaving quanta to continuity is that atom cannot be conceived as a solar system writ-small. Even the distinction between matter and energy, on a sub-atomic level, fails.
Another key aspect is the impossibility, on a microscopic level, to divide the observing subject from the observed object; the subject is integral part of the observed system — every observing act affects the whole in an unpredictable way. The innovation of quantum physics does not lie in the awareness of such an influence, but rather in the impossibility of controlling it: it is not possible to determine how important perturbations coming from observation are. The uncertainty principle, discovered by Heisenberg in 1927, states that it is theoretically impossible to measure accurately both position and momentum (velocity) of a particle: observation of one quantity will necessarily affect the value of the other. Complementariness is the conceptual tool to simultaneously define both matter's descriptions — particle and wave — as “real”; yet they cancel each other out because of their contexts' independence. But quantum mechanics reveals something much more unusual about “reality”. The observer cannot look at the quantum particle without exerting an influence upon it — the measuring process moves the virtual to the physical. When all possibilities of quantum mechanics (wave function) break off, one of the possible results turns real. Once detected, new information get forwarded into the world.
This is a question of ontological, rather than epistemological, character. There is a virtual dimension, not visible to reality, which exerts a direct influence on the material, “visible” dimension, in a way that cannot be thoroughly quantified.
So far we have monitored and subdued the visible side, the matter particle, believing that we were representing nature as a whole. Instead, we have studied and represented just a part of it. Some great art masters did imagine the virtual dimension (the wave), but they could not rely on structured knowledge to go beyond a prophetic sight. Nowadays we know that that invisible part exists, and that nature is a complex subject comprising particles and waves.
Casualness and determinism are in question, that is to say two principles which 19th Century physics more or less explicitly focused upon — and along with it, philosophy, science, politics and mainly art.
A new idea of nature in art thoroughly upsets history too, because of the role that art historically played in representing it.
What is being shown nowadays is that conscience would be a key physical property, that brain could “point out” and “process”. Brainwaves would be a rare epi-phenomenon of quantum effect, which appears directly in common reality, and not at atomic level.
Semir Zeki, one of the most renowned neuroscientists in the world, pioneer and founder of the discipline called “neuroaesthetics”, which explores the relation between brain functioning and artistic representation, proves that, since aesthetics assumes an accurate and complex knowledge of sight, and since such a knowledge cannot be achieved without a neuroscientific discourse, an aesthetics entailing this alleged validity duration should be biologically grounded. The question of fastening reflection on the object to the direct and inner knowledge of the object itself — which has always involved philosophy in its relationship with the fields and knowledge that it has focused onto, dealing also with aesthetics and art criticism — has been thrown on the table again and again by Zeki from a biologic viewpoint: to be able to define what passes through sight, that is work of art’s enjoyment, one has to refer to an array of technical knowledge which justify that phenomenon and those mechanisms going under the collective name of “sight”. Sight is an active and well-constructed process. As numerous examples on healthy and brain-injured subjects testify, the act of seeing is markedly constructive and as such, it can be dissembled in a number of steps, which still have to be entirely defined (among which, for instance, the acknowledgement of color, shape and chromatic relations between two different yet close areas), steps whose accomplishment relies on anatomic frames which can be mutually identified and recognized.
Zeki points out a curious interrelationship between the gnosiological meaning of certain art forms, and the cognitive function of every single steps sight includes: as if artists would select — from time to time and without being conscious — one of the sight’s neuronal mechanisms to exploit it, isolate it, boost it and enhance it massively and artistically. For example Monet seemed aware of the mechanisms ruling color coherence, that is to say the chromatic identity an object shows in different lightning conditions. In other words, an object’s color always looks the same, even if it should not, given the mutually different lights it experiences. With the renowned series dedicated to Rouen’s Cathedral, Monet would have tried, even unconsciously, to anticipate (or take away with another cognitive operation) the chromatic homogenization, by giving the cathedral’s “true” color over different moments of the day and different weather conditions. Calder, Mondrian and many others would have never appeared less epistemologically aware of aspects such as sight of movement and shape. In this sense, according to Zeki, the artist is an unconscious neurologist and a neuroscientist ahead of his own time.
It is art itself, Zeki adds — describing a demanding and accurate aesthetics of his own — that can be defined following the example of sight and its biologic function. Sight is basically a process of selection and singling out of constants aimed at knowledge — art is the same. It is in this sense that two aesthetics, so different the one from the other like Platonic and Hegelian ones — strict censor of the double and pauperizing artistic mimesis the former, celebrator of its absolute power the latter — can be reconciled; for art is — as Plato would have wished and in spite his own beliefs — the quest towards essentialness, and for this very reason, representative particularization of the universal. The brain builds up an idea of object or situation, which comes from its experiences of many objects and situations, experiences it collects into a synthesis of object and “ideal” situation. Yet everyday experience of single objects or situations may not satisfy the more global synthetic idea, bringing about as a result brain’s everlasting dissatisfaction.
The creative challenge may profit — and has profited — from such dissatisfaction. A way to come close to the idea existing in the brain, is to leave the artwork unfinished, just like Michelangelo did, who did not finish three-fifth of his works. In this case, the observer can finish it in different ways, and that’s the very benefit. Once Schopenhauer wrote that you have to leave your mind with something it can do, better if it is the last thing — for this reason we admire Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures or many paintings by Cézanne.
Note that we are conscious of a single interpretation a time, and this brings about a key ambiguity factor, which is a precious feature in works of art and creativity. In its neurologic definition, ambiguity is not the indeterminacy or uncertainty we find in dictionaries — just the opposite. It is certainty of numerous interpretations mutually diverging the one from the other, each of which dominates for a moment.
As such a defined answer does not exist, for all answers are plausible alike. For the ambiguous and the unfinished can satisfy the brain more than some thorough completeness. Imaging studies reveal that when we watch ambiguous shapes, brain activity’s focus moves from an area under frontal lobe’s control.
Only recently art has been systematically investigated through the conceptual tools supplied by evolution theory. As cultural expression subject to great unsteadiness, even on an individual level, aesthetic perception, along with artistic creation, has been considered a phenomenon, which is hard to refer to brain biology, and in its rising, to Homo Sapiens Sapiens’ phylogeny. Contemporary approaches to art which seem to refer more directly to neo-Darwinian synthesis are two — evolutionary psychology and neuroaesthetics. Evolutionary psychology aims at justifying a great number of human phenomena, by basing on the general evolutionary theory. Especially two scholars, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, pioneers of the discipline, aim at building up a psychological basis of culture. Their main premise lays in the fact that human nature is universal, and that nonetheless such universality finds its expression first and foremost in psychological mechanisms resulting form evolution, and not from cultural expressed behaviors. So cultural changeability does not contradict universality, it is rather a collection of data allowing to better understand the structure of underlying psychological mechanisms. The second assumption rests on the fact that psychological mechanisms resulting from evolution are adaptations, shaped by natural selection on the long run. “Aesthetic” perception is not a negligible sub-product of selection, but rather a precise adaptation answer, yet originated in the environment where our hunter-picker forefathers got evolved over two millions years.
Instead, as we have seen in Zeki, neuro-aesthetics moves from new knowledge onto brain functioning, from general architecture to physiology of perception, to explain aesthetic experience in terms of neurobiology, and not of commonsense psychology or philosophy (as traditional aesthetics does). Studies about sight are paradigmatic, starting from David Hubel’s and Torsten Wiesel’s singling out of cells which respond to differently oriented lines.
Starting from such results, other neurophysiologists, particularly Semir Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran are trying to single out brain areas “ascribed” to art. And then, from there, hark back to their evolutionary history.
There are, eventually, approaches which do not exclude phenomenology, and the first-person approach, by matching it with neurosciences and evolutionism. Special attention shall go to the neo-jamesian recovery of the distinction of fringes and nucleus in the mental conceptualization, aimed at suggesting a peculiar reading of art’s genesis and function.
“Art, just like every human activity — morality, law and religion included — depends on brain’s laws and complies to them”. (S. Zeki, “Journal of Consciousness Studies”, 2002).
According to him, to understand what art is, what makes it so important and what makes an artist better than another one, you cannot but refer to the part of the brain where art gets created and appreciated. Even if neural bases of the subject’s artistic creativity and appreciation of artworks are not fully known, the massive improvements achieved in the knowledge of brain areas ascribed to sight, have allowed to start formulating some neural laws, which ground art and aesthetics.
Zeki suggests that we see with our brain, not with our eyes: eyes are nothing but filters through which visual signals pass and get addressed to brain visual areas.
Therefore sight is a process of selection and of finding out crucial information aimed at knowledge. Through his visual frame, the artist gets to know reality and makes his own ideas (for instance an idea of love, of a natural landscape, of a straight line), that he then represent in his works. Also he who benefits from the work of art similarly relies on a visual system to sketch his own idea of beauty according to which he will appreciate the artwork or not. Through neuroaesthetics, Zeki has opened the way to a totally unexplored research field, where art gets investigated on the basis of the study of neurobiological mechanisms, which affect brain functioning; moreover, by stressing that art results from brain and complies with its laws, neuroaesthetics has the line between art and science grown thinner and thinner. The visual perception shall not be held as a mere recognition of the objects forming the physical world. This is immediately all-clear by watching images where our visual system perceives objects which are not physically there. Among the most renowned examples, Kanitza’s triangle, in which we see a white triangle covering three circles, and the triangle, which we likewise perceive as protruding from the sheet, is not physically there, just perceptively. The phenomenal world we perceive does not clearly consist of physical objects that surround us, it rather results from a number of considerations, performed by the retina and cortex’s visual areas. Studying the way information spread all over our visual cortex gets organized to shape objects’ representation is therefore prerequisite. Over the trajectory from the physical object to the observer, light radiations are completely independent among each other. On its turn the retina consists of a patchwork of histologically separate elements. Over this process, the original object’s unity gets completely lost, but in the end, the object appears again, on a perceptive level, as a unitary presence. How is this re-construction possible? This process is known as perceptual grouping, and has been widely investigated by no less than two different standpoints: on the one hand it has been a research topic of Gestalt experimental psychology, as an attempt at singling out phenomenal laws of perceptual organization; on the other, neuro-physiological studies have focused on the recovery of the biological functions underlying the grouping process.
Music is another fascinating example of the use of brain conceptions, or rather, of one brain conception disappointed by everyday experience. Wagner wrote Tristan and Isolde with a single aim, that he confessed to Liszt: “Since I have not been able to experience the true happiness of love in my all life, I mean to compose the grandest monument to the grandest illusion”. The illusion is, as we know, a product of the brain. Opera provides quite a few interesting aspects for a neurobiologist, although here I just mean to draw the attention on the unsolved lines — to be solved at the end — and on the long silences, which brought a critic to wonder: “whoever composed more beautiful silences than Wagner?”. From a neurobiologic perspective, they are two features allowing listener’s imagination and creativity to be involved in the opera.
ART HISTORY
In Art History, contemporary art rediscovers, just like in Leonardo da Vinci’s times, a different “Reality” — the microscopic reality of quanta and of chaos, as afore-explained.
It is recognized that every time and every culture are marked by a different aesthetic view, that is, by a different analogy to beauty, taste and well-being. As a matter of fact, “aesthetics” comes from Greek aisthetikos, “sensitive”, and from aisthanesthai, “perceive”. It therefore defines that “forma mentis” corresponding to the chance to highlight an historically selective faculty which, by mingling mind and emotion, credits visual and perceptual impressions originated from any event that can be set in the referring frame of space and time. So the conceptions of time and space are so crucial in the culture of any era, that any change they experience thoroughly modifies the grounding criteria upon which our world’s view rests.
As a consequence, culture acquired in any era and from any cultural ethnicity, becomes all-important in defining the main lines of the “aesthetics”, which regularly characterize both assessment criteria of scientific rationality and assessment criteria of beauty in art.
So conceptions regarding time and space are fundamental to outline the imaginary background in which any element of aesthetic appreciation is assessed rationally and emotionally.
We actually note that in the historic era which marked the rural civilization, the passing of time was considered “cyclic”, in relation to the need of contemplating a time for sowing and a time for harvest. In that historic time art was not intended as creative autonomous reality, but rather as a display of abilities grounded on the imitation and contemplation of nature as divine creation associated to an allegoric cyclicity of the repetitive passing of life and death. Middle Age key expressive frames actually symbolize life’s transience in becoming over the seasons in juxtaposition to death’s and afterlife’s eternity. In the early Renaissance, conceptuality with regards to time and space happened to change along with the developments of mechanic conceptions, which led to craftsmanship. The need to accurately measure machines’ gears brought to the need of defining in detail objects’ location in the space. So after the coming-up of time-and-space mechanic idea, Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) had already expressed an accurate definition of perspective in painting aesthetics in his book titled “De Prospectiva Pingendi”. Leonardo da Vinci improved the foundations of “descriptive geometry”, as investigation of objective representation in tridimensional space, which are the basis of Renaissance painting technique. As such “geometric perspective” outlines the passing-by from a cyclic idea of time to a new linear dimension of it, which will be a benchmark of Mechanic Science over the whole development of Industrial Age. Then Classic Physics came to an idea of Time as definitely apart from Space, where time dimension had been basically held as subjective, and thus conventionally measurable by a clock, in the light of an outer space definable in its objective dimension. So Descartes’ structure of space and time, both considered as independent factors, grounded on a clear-cut and arbitrary distinction between subject and object, by going beyond the conception supported by Renaissance, which put man at the center of the capacity of cognitive integration. So stabilization of mechanic conceptuality gave rise to the separation of two cultures, scientific and artistic-humanist, which ruled over the Industrial Age.
Along the industrial development especially, “photography” could mechanically exploit what had come out from the expression of projection optics, by basing the photographic process on a conception implying rays of light coming from any light source, which gather, through a lens, on a photographic plate. In this way the photo-pressing has been invented according to the approximation arisen from the early perspective sight of lightning reality. At the beginning of the past century the printed image had already improved by the fixing techniques featured by movie films, and this has obviously contributed to a deep change in the painting style of Cubism, which Pablo Picasso started in 1907 with the famous painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (New York, Museum of Modern Art) — a crucial artwork for the future change in the representation of Time-and-Space in modern art. This painting is seen as the beginning of the deep change affecting figurative art, in that it suggests a sharp getting-over based on the geometric aesthetics of perspective; in the afore-said painting, it is clear how space and time are disassembled into two-dimensional volumes, apart yet “simultaneously” perceived from the different standpoints pertaining to the different observers. “Information simultaneity” is actually conceptual core which run through science over the entire 19th Century, by breaking up its different approaches into irreconcilable sections as Relativistic Mechanics (RM) and Quantum Mechanics (QM) in Physics. For Relativistic Mechanics suggested by Albert Einstein as special relativity (1905), only the fact that the speed of light has an absolute and constant value is accepted; so time and space become relative and mutually changeable, because they happen to depend on the Observers’ viewpoints. Therefore at the same time as “Cubism”, also relativity in science questions going beyond traditional conception of classic physics. In this way it passes from the traditional conception of time and space as two mutually independent, absolute entities, to a continuous “quadri-vector chronotope” dynamic system, in which space and time can change geometries and mutual dimensions. So Euclidean space bends and time contracts. Such an RM position leads to various paradoxes, the most renowned of which being the so-called “twins paradox”, which probably persuaded Salvador Dalì to represent time’s relativistic flexibility in the panting “Melting Clocks”.
Einstein’s generalization of sight’s relativity principle prevents simultaneous events to occur, since every possible event is “localizable” in a univocal structuring of the “quadri-vector” as definable from three dimensions of Space and one dimension of Time.
Instead of focusing onto the Macroscopic world as RM does, Quantum Mechanics ends up solving the experimental fact that light particles (photons), like sound particles (phonons) and also electrons, etc., appear to behave simultaneously both as Waves and as Particles. The issue of behavior “simultaneity” sharply clashes with the localization chance of measures. Just like Zeno of Elea’s (c.a. 490 b.C.) arrow paradox, if we want to measure speed and position simultaneously, we have first to stop the arrow to tell exactly its position, and then look at its speed without changing its trajectory.
Hence in the case too of dualism between localizable particle and de-localized wave, the conjugated quantities, though being simultaneously there, bring about indeterminacy of measurement, as stated by Werner Heisemberg (1927) with the QM principle. As a fact, keeping the space-and-time structure unaltered was considered necessary: the only way to knowledge in the microcosm was the “probabilistic” one.
The resulting fracture from reason and physic reality, with the “Indeterminacy Principle” actually tackles the issue of scientific realism status — apparently sensible — in which outer reality is considered objective, no matter the thinking subject; such an approach actually brought to paradoxical conclusions. Seen that QM reality can be effectively known only beyond indeterminacy, that is to say only when localization in space becomes measurable, Ervin Schrodinger articulated a further reflection known as “Schrodinger’s Cat” paradox.
The poor cat, caged in a box, if “unobserved” may seem “dead or alive at the same time”. So in QM’s probabilistic interpretation, when nobody watches it, the cat exists in a “superposition state” where it has 50% probability of being both dead and alive. So in QM, the cat may simultaneously exist or not exist in a “complementary sight”, held true by QM. Only if it gets observed, the box opened, it is possible to know whether it is effectively alive or dead.
“A paradox is an apparently realistic reasoning, that starts from sensible premises and comes to a conclusion, which clashes with the premises”.
When it happens, we have to go through the grounding criteria which we held as unalterable, and adopt a new idea of reality. So nowadays we have to accept to change the cognitive paradigm, which dogmatically makes the time-and-space structure unaltered. The various paradoxes discussed in the context of science and 20th Century artistic representations have indicated the need for art and science to reconcile within a renewed unitary paradigmatic criteria, just like it happened in the Renaissance, when a sharp correspondence between art and science in the unification of cognitive and aesthetic foundations was detected, for man was considered at the centre of the cognitive process.
Thus contemporary art and science shall go beyond mechanic reductionism basically suggested from the possibility to objectively watch the outer world without realizing of being part of it. The renewed expressions of our age’s aesthetic feeling have led to a distinct “interdisciplinary” reconciliation and to a wide opposition between art and science. Technological evolution of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has allowed to re-organize relations between art and science within the simulations of the scientific imagery through the expression of state-of-the-art “Digit-Art” activities. With the computer’s help, artists benefit from a wide range of software, which have helped the coming-up of new techniques capable of fostering artist’s creativity, who becomes himself, through Generative-Art, inventor of algorithms and software — definitely all-important to perform scientific simulations — that allowed computerized visualization of nanotechnologies.
In this way deepness of visual perception, negotiated by the development of high-resolution optic technologies, has recently allowed to manufacture nanostructures which, thanks to new image techniques become the new manufacturing reality, and open a new sensitivity and contemplation on reductionism, separating objective reality from the ideas, with which the new nano-reality gets viewed and manipulated within the film of hidden space-and-time.
ECONOMICS
In modern economics, materialist culture generating property as synonym of market (from physical space to goods’ sale process) prevailed, but nowadays markets make way to nets, and property is replaced by access; exchange on buyers’ and sellers’ property stock market is the hub of economic life no more.
Private property does not disappear, but is exchanged, the supplier keeps the good’s property, yet he leaves it in temporary usufruct to the client/server, on payment of a rate, rental or enrolment fee or information desirable to the market.
Nowadays Google and Facebook are current market’s valuable pieces and respond to that very philosophy. Nanosecond is access culture as capital is in property culture. But trends show that property of physical goods tends to be considered expense rather than wealth.
Nowadays intellectual capital is the overruling power — just think about the transaction between Obama and FIAT. FIAT’s intellectual capital has been the Italian group’s success factor, and has been considered more important than Crysler’s wealth.
The long-run trend of the long-run’s system will be the replacement of industrially-manufactured goods and services with the cultural experiences exchange (travels and global tourism, theme-parks and theme-towns, fun- and wellness-specialized centers, fashion and restaurants, professional sport, music, cinema television, art, virtual world, cyber-space and electronic entertainment). Devastating side-effects for the future civilization take on shape: the economic field has always been drawn from the cultural one, which on its turn has always determined shared behavior rules.
But now?
Restoring a balance between culture power and economics power will be the century’s crucial dilemma. For instance, how to protect and foster cultural differences. 21th century men shall see themselves as integral knots of an interests’ shared net, and not as autonomous agents of a Darwinian world struggling for survival anymore. Pc shall be as vital as the printing press in knowledge building; from work commodification we will move towards entertainment commodification. Old industry principles will give way to the new values of cultural capitalism, which will push cultural domain into the empire of economics. Culture will be the overruling value. For this reason greater finance has turned to the last, still-independent sector of human activity — culture.
Electronic nets allowing access to an ever-increasing number of experiences are controlled by a limited number of multinational media powers. History records no precedents of such a wider power in human communications. Gatekeepers set terms and conditions according to which billions of people will have the chance to interact in the coming future. The economic and social gap among people grows and grows relentlessly. One-fifth of mankind is migrating to the cyber-space, whereas the others are stuck in the caves of poverty and often starve to death. In internet era more than half population has never used a phone, but if the gap between the haves and the have-nots is wide, the gap between the connected and not-connected will be even wider. Access to the net has apparently become the necessary way to progress and personal satisfaction.
The new scenarios of fights/agreements among major financial groups to control Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube and other social network, prove what afore-said. For many people internet holds the same evocative power the democratic vision used to have in the past. So a powerful conceptual tool to re-shape a view of the world is the new era’s most successful metaphor.
PHILOSOPHY
In the Western philosophy of the past two centuries, ideologies and political — and even religious — movements, despite rare exceptions, have bowed their heads to materialist culture: Enlightenment, Socialism and Liberalism included.
What do we mean by “materialist culture”?
Superiority of economics upon man and nature, of determinism upon indeterminacy, of causality upon complementariness, of order upon chaos, of endlessness of progress upon its limitations, have been icons upon which mankind’s lives got built through the Modern Age. The economic triad, science and communication, has trained us to the alluring and self-destructive procedure of manufacturing and consuming.
As ABO poignantly writes: “Manufacturing from advertising’s trick gives rise to a kind of hunger, an unquenchable longing for objects of consumption. But the situation gets reverted: now it is the object that chases the subject. Manufacturing opens its sadistic hunting season on the individual. In this, there is a roles inversion now, and a new hierarchy of positions, where man finds himself in the middle”.
Andy Warhol has been the greatest theorist as well as practitioner of materialist art. “I believe that all paintings should have same sizes and same colors. In this way they could be interchangeable and nobody would have a painting better than, or worse than, someone else”, claimed our Andy.
The work of art becomes a space marked by technical reproductibility. Society is not a space for freedom but for trade. “Business art is a step above art”, proclaimed Pittsburgh’s Peter Pan. The balance of social indifference has been compass for this, by assuming the macroscopic natural order as insuperable. It did not catch on following Buddhist thinking: “Only after being free from any conventional power, we can be enlightened”. Everything was leveled, standardized, homologated, justified, ordered. Yet recent discoveries have revealed that chaos does exist, that it is the commonest situation in nature, whereas order is relatively rare, and can be upset by the smallest perturbation.
Order looks like a drunk man tiptoeing on a classic dancer’s pointe shoes.
Chaos is an hippopotamus sunk in the mud. The question is learning how to control it, and understand its inner dynamics, to exploit its endless creativity.
Nature itself adopts chaos as integral part of its evolution plan. To solve the problem of adjusting survival life forms in a complex, ever-changing, apparently chaotic environment, every deterministic plan would be doomed to failure.
So nature chooses to fight chaos through chaos, by begetting a host of life-forms through casual mutations.
Materialist plan’s strictness has gone out of kilter, like a flipper.
Who tries to restore it, is wasting our time and chances.
Materialism has run out of propelling boost: the sooner we realize that, the better.
ART
In quantum mechanics, matter’s double nature matches an artwork’s double nature. A photon is simultaneously particle and wave just like a work of art comes out to be both a series of structural relations (a system of neurological, psychological and physical processes) and of special objects (the artwork).
The mystics Kandinskij, Klee and Mondrian, who “wanted to tear apart the veil that sensible appearance dropped, to reach some higher truth”, had sensed the process. It is of course a conceptual, rather than a physical, dualism. How can it be that diametrically opposed models may coexist without suffering any cognitive dissonance?
Niels Bohr — among quantum mechanics’ founders — points out the solution: to accept the paradox.
Let us take the representatives, who are most devoted to digital art research. They exploit web’s double ontology by recurring to the various interactivity levels within a single project. As a consequence, borders between internet virtual world and human bodies’ definite reality mix together. The same borders’ intermingling — ontological dualism itself — is to be found in quantum mechanics, according to which a photon is both a quantum wave and a sub-atomic particle.
To grasp digital media’s materiality of the immaterial, or immateriality of the material, one shall abandon all ultimatums and adopt an opposite logic, typical of complementariness’ conceptual dualism.
A work of art relying on interactive media — just like a quantum system —is both material and immaterial; it is characterized both by stillness (code) and dynamism of code interpretation (functioning program), the same way a photon is both a measurable object (particle) and an array of virtual particles (probabilistic wave function).
Roy Ascott maintains that: “Art has turned away from forms’ behavior to devote to behavior’s forms”.
Of course the passion art feels for forms has not completely disappeared, but it is undeniable that new artistic currents claim new rules to follow. This does not wipe away formalism, in the same way as quantum mechanics does not discredit the Newtonian approach. It depends on the context, which the observer finds himself into. Different contexts call for different criteria. The development of complex phenomena, such as cognitive philosophy, is carried out on the system’s level, rather than on the objects’. You shall focus on ideas.
“Conceptual art definition opens to artistic expressions, which cannot be judged and understood according to definite and known products, but to procedures and processes, just like it happens with other media. In other words, the change that this term introduces, concerns not only art form and subject, but also its very structure”. Rolf Wederer upon conceptual art, at the opening of exhibition “Konzeption/Conception” (1969).
John Cage cleared up the idea: “Conceptual art is an art, whose subject matter is concepts, as sound is subject matter of music”.
Nowadays we understand that time-and-space codification of rhythms and vocal harmonies depend on a self-organized modulation system of information signals coded by brain activity in order to generate audible sound perceptions.
Phones — the smallest units of a phoneme — are linked to a phonon’s multiple entanglement process, that is to say energy quanta correlating waves associated to quantum particles, generating as such a unit, which takes on the properties of information simultaneous exchange through the entire environment where voice stems from, which can be also synchronically organized as song.
Every road leads to quantum.
The idea of complementariness, introduced by quantum mechanics, represents a model for comprehending the conceptual dualism of both realities, the physical and the virtual.
To understand the implications in art, let us think at the observer’s new role, and at what Gadamer and Levi Strauss analyzed.
The idea of aesthetic event postulated by H.G. Gadamer states that a work of art does not exist thanks to its gross materialness, but rather to the immaterial processes of information and interpretation it brings into action.
We get here to the principle of indifference, which appeared in art history together with Modern Age. It is actually Modern Age, that brings about lack of involvement towards natural events in the making of an artwork. Manet’s young prostitute Olimpia is Impressionism’s manifesto. This very canvas actually highlights the lack of involvement with reality: Manet could have depicted his model as a crooked, sick and vicious being. He did just the opposite: he did not partake emotionally in what he was painting, and he portrayed her just as painters could have portrayed a countess’ nude till the century before. So this painting brought forth that process of non-involvement which would later become one of the main features of modern and contemporary art.
Impressionism used to take a “piece of reality” away from the work of art, and spotlighted the way to make every artist’s artwork distinctive. It was the beginning of Modern Age.
But where is the agent which brought about the non-involvement process expressed in the principle of indifference?
It is in the artist’s personal view, not only upon art, but also upon life and world. In this way the artist becomes observer once again, by taking agency delegations away from museums, art galleries, dealers and art critics.
A quantum view of art re-evaluates the very conception of doubling. With his Bottle-rack, Duchamps asked himself a question nobody will ever answer: “What is a work of art?”.
“If I take a bottle-rack from a wine seller, if I sign it and place it into an art gallery, would it become a work of art?”. Yes, it would, because the given bottle-rack would undergo what Surrealists called “estrangement”, that is, the transliteration of the real: that object would not be meant to drain bottles anymore, and would become a unity of forms.
Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss held a lecture about Duchamps’ bottle-rack, and stated that it was no more what it had been assembled for, but it was rather a ghost, something suggesting and inferring to something else, and that for this reason it stirred up emotion. Such an emotion proves that an object’s estrangement may generate a work of art.
Yet the idea of estrangement has nothing to do with the materiality of an artwork. Only by adopting the principle of complementariness, estrangement can be understood and proven.
If these thoughts make sense, then modern and contemporary art history’s milestones have to be questioned. For the time being, we list them, and later on we will go through them in detail: more than enough is too much, value of a work of art, from market to access, from nature/particle to nature/wave, from object to process, from reproductibility to uniqueness.
More than enough is too much
Nowadays art’s belly is full, stuffed, constipated.
Millions artists, thousands galleries, thousands dealers, thousands curators, journalists, magazines, trade-shows, museums.
A tangle mass of hungry mouths ready to devour each other for a piece of belly, yet always doomed to reach the rectum.
It will take time, but we know what such tangle mass will become.
Two dates will give an idea of this mega-trend.
September 16, 2008
Damien Hirst sells straight on the market for USD 200 millions.
Bye bye Gagosian, White Cube and Art basel.
April 25, 2009
Victor Pinchuk opens his personal Museum in Kiev, hosting 200 works by Damien Hirst. The collector, by breaking up habits and hierarchies, wants to be considered the new Prince.
The main actor is the collector, which relies, from time to time, to artists. Danger and opportunity, it always depends from the new Middle Ages’ points of view. Everything lying in-between collector and artist — from galleries to trade-shows — does not count anymore, and therefore is doomed to get changed or disappear, since both the producer (artist) and the final consumer (collector) take it as outdated.
There will be a massive selection, which will be managed by money.
Contemporary art quotations will keep exceed ancient and modern art ones.
Unimaginable prices will be reached.
Money will be the greater sieve to select artists.
Of course this does not mean that the best artists will be credited. The other way round. At this stage artists actually wag their tails around, more concerned of going to the cashier’s than down in history.
But billionaire too will get tired of throwing their money into the loo.
And then they will understand that there is another way of being owners, apart from money: allowing access to high-quality artworks to millions, billions clients. The property of an artwork becomes a way to nationalize beauty’s enjoyment. This will make the new aesthetic values clearer and clearer.
Only those artists who shall guarantee quality will be credited. Quality means artists working on the process rather than on the product, and artists that produce less, well and unique pieces. The age of reproductibility (and maybe of artworks’ physicality) is archeology.
After all we have to consider a logistics issue. Where are we going to physically put the works of art which will be made at an exponential rhythm (see the number of aspiring artists, that come out every year from Academies and Universities worldwide)?
Shall we plan artworks’ incinerators (to Marinetti’s and Futurists’ happiness)?
Everything leads us think to a new system.
We will pass from the current Prozac Art — exciting to be convincing — to creative Brunello di Montalcino, from the physical to the connected city. He who does not understand that this wave will upset the art world, will have better change career.
So are we going to go back to elites?
This is the trend. After all nowadays only million-dollar artists are sold. Contemporary art has become a financial product, with its pros and cons. The greatest danger is that it may turn into a speculation bubble.
At the moment there are two categories of collectors: predators and entrepreneurs.
The former catch hold of, and take pleasure in, the conquering/predatory act. The latter take pleasure in the aesthetic quality of the artwork they invest into.
I focus on the former’s re-education, and above all to the entrepreneurs — I leave to auction houses those who take Cattelan’s work for a depressed cats’ playground.
Moving from the object to the process shall allow to overcome the historic gap between visual art and performing art, by realizing that the latter will draw the former. Artistic objects will be traded no more; unique and unrepeatable events will take place; physical exchange will give way to virtual access; the local event will give way to the global.
Major sport, music, religious and politic events have opened this way. The technological tool itself will undergo a change, moving from flat image (television) to three-dimensional image (hologram).
The passage from the information era to an era of educated enjoyment or knowledge entertainment, presumes the passage from information to multi-media communication, from spectator to actor, from the idea of mere using to the exciting idea of co-producing.
Hologram will allow to overcome the conception of passive usability, by ascribing the same value to the physical as well as virtual presence.
Think about huge pop gatherings or raves.
The current model is based on enjoyableness of physical presence and of the social behavior concerning frenzy.
In art, it is the model of major exhibitions and grand museum/fair events. Such models are too basic and age-old in the globalization era.
It means thinking about a model of few artistic events, but with a planetary echo, by recurring to new ways of contemporariness, internet and hologram.
Television shall comply with them.
Few un-reproducible yet enjoyable and interactive events with billions people around.
Huge multi-media platforms which will carry around art goods. In this way the danger of a monopolist management of contemporary art market will be avoided.
It will be like in the web market: few monopolists fighting against each other to control the economics of knowledge. Of course the risk of an Orwellian control increases, but the man has always found the way to break free from slaveries old an new.
And nowadays too web monopolists without our access would become other speculation bubbles, because in the economics of knowledge, the value lays in the collective as well as in the individual mind, and without our minds, their cyber-economy would turn into digital trash.
New revolutions will move from the control of material production media to the control of social re-production media, and of production of knowledge.
Rosenberg wrote: “Avant-garde audience is open to anything. Its keen members rush to organize exhibitions and to supply illustrative labels ages before colors have dried on canvases, or plastic caked. Critics help in this by nosing into essays like bloodhounds, ready to discover the art of the future and to take initiative, as well as build reputations. Art critics are always on the alert, camera and scrap-book in their hands, to be all-sure they won't miss to note down any detail. The tradition of the new has cut down all traditions and ordinariness”.
Theoretically speaking, art history has so far engaged with the classical dynamics of a man mastering and measuring things scattered through a universal space, which otherwise would be incomprehensible and unfathomable.
The world is a huge, insane mass of molecules standing in the space, according to partly-known laws; molecules turn into objects, objects feature shapes and colors, then grow old, die down and regenerate in a cycle complying with utterly autonomous principles.
Nature is order.
We inherited Plato's teaching: a divine being has drawn the universe out of disorder and brought it to order, and has founded the realm of shapes and geometrical proportions. The world is mathematically ordered: science people commit to discover its ruling laws, artists to represent it. And even when he brooded upon microscopic levels, he considered them as miniature copies of macroscopic clones.
As we know, however, according to the current interpretations of scientific discoveries, it is quantum mechanics laws that really matter.
Yet I start by saying that I hate “-isms” and art history framed in movements. I suggest a research trend, a convergence panorama, a critical and creative approach to break up any interpretation frame.
We are currently undergoing a crisis age, which is moving from a social, economic and cultural system centered upon materialistic values, upon a binary system of ultimatums towards a completely different one. Awareness or fear of such a statement grows and grows every passing day.
Art, along with science, philosophy, economics and politics pursue a crucial mission: to promote the establishment of a knowledge society featuring new cultural, ethic and social values, by breaking up the current ones, subject as they are to a material view of man and his life. If we analyze the real processes ongoing, we will find out that the future is part of our everyday life, even if we are still unaware of that.
We are driving a brain-controlled spaceship, and keep looking for control-stick, brake and accelerator!
Let us meditate upon different fields.
SCIENCE
Quantum physics discoveries in science have revolutionized our way of thinking.
At the moment of its creation, all matter includes a double nature: both particle and wave, it depends on the way you decide to measure it. Matter's double nature results from the interactions with matter itself, rather than a sort of intrinsic property of a reality endowed with an objective, autonomous existence.
“Within physical reality, virtual states are part of the realm of potentials, for they include the future empiric possibilities of universe”.
To solve several thermodynamic problems, Max Planck presumed that energy exchanges only take place in small discontinuous particles, quanta — energy clusters which can be divided no further. It is an innovation not to be underrated: since then all physical processes had been considered continuous and gradual. Planck found out that Leibniz was wrong — “natura facit saltus”. A consequence of leaving quanta to continuity is that atom cannot be conceived as a solar system writ-small. Even the distinction between matter and energy, on a sub-atomic level, fails.
Another key aspect is the impossibility, on a microscopic level, to divide the observing subject from the observed object; the subject is integral part of the observed system — every observing act affects the whole in an unpredictable way. The innovation of quantum physics does not lie in the awareness of such an influence, but rather in the impossibility of controlling it: it is not possible to determine how important perturbations coming from observation are. The uncertainty principle, discovered by Heisenberg in 1927, states that it is theoretically impossible to measure accurately both position and momentum (velocity) of a particle: observation of one quantity will necessarily affect the value of the other. Complementariness is the conceptual tool to simultaneously define both matter's descriptions — particle and wave — as “real”; yet they cancel each other out because of their contexts' independence. But quantum mechanics reveals something much more unusual about “reality”. The observer cannot look at the quantum particle without exerting an influence upon it — the measuring process moves the virtual to the physical. When all possibilities of quantum mechanics (wave function) break off, one of the possible results turns real. Once detected, new information get forwarded into the world.
This is a question of ontological, rather than epistemological, character. There is a virtual dimension, not visible to reality, which exerts a direct influence on the material, “visible” dimension, in a way that cannot be thoroughly quantified.
So far we have monitored and subdued the visible side, the matter particle, believing that we were representing nature as a whole. Instead, we have studied and represented just a part of it. Some great art masters did imagine the virtual dimension (the wave), but they could not rely on structured knowledge to go beyond a prophetic sight. Nowadays we know that that invisible part exists, and that nature is a complex subject comprising particles and waves.
Casualness and determinism are in question, that is to say two principles which 19th Century physics more or less explicitly focused upon — and along with it, philosophy, science, politics and mainly art.
A new idea of nature in art thoroughly upsets history too, because of the role that art historically played in representing it.
What is being shown nowadays is that conscience would be a key physical property, that brain could “point out” and “process”. Brainwaves would be a rare epi-phenomenon of quantum effect, which appears directly in common reality, and not at atomic level.
Semir Zeki, one of the most renowned neuroscientists in the world, pioneer and founder of the discipline called “neuroaesthetics”, which explores the relation between brain functioning and artistic representation, proves that, since aesthetics assumes an accurate and complex knowledge of sight, and since such a knowledge cannot be achieved without a neuroscientific discourse, an aesthetics entailing this alleged validity duration should be biologically grounded. The question of fastening reflection on the object to the direct and inner knowledge of the object itself — which has always involved philosophy in its relationship with the fields and knowledge that it has focused onto, dealing also with aesthetics and art criticism — has been thrown on the table again and again by Zeki from a biologic viewpoint: to be able to define what passes through sight, that is work of art’s enjoyment, one has to refer to an array of technical knowledge which justify that phenomenon and those mechanisms going under the collective name of “sight”. Sight is an active and well-constructed process. As numerous examples on healthy and brain-injured subjects testify, the act of seeing is markedly constructive and as such, it can be dissembled in a number of steps, which still have to be entirely defined (among which, for instance, the acknowledgement of color, shape and chromatic relations between two different yet close areas), steps whose accomplishment relies on anatomic frames which can be mutually identified and recognized.
Zeki points out a curious interrelationship between the gnosiological meaning of certain art forms, and the cognitive function of every single steps sight includes: as if artists would select — from time to time and without being conscious — one of the sight’s neuronal mechanisms to exploit it, isolate it, boost it and enhance it massively and artistically. For example Monet seemed aware of the mechanisms ruling color coherence, that is to say the chromatic identity an object shows in different lightning conditions. In other words, an object’s color always looks the same, even if it should not, given the mutually different lights it experiences. With the renowned series dedicated to Rouen’s Cathedral, Monet would have tried, even unconsciously, to anticipate (or take away with another cognitive operation) the chromatic homogenization, by giving the cathedral’s “true” color over different moments of the day and different weather conditions. Calder, Mondrian and many others would have never appeared less epistemologically aware of aspects such as sight of movement and shape. In this sense, according to Zeki, the artist is an unconscious neurologist and a neuroscientist ahead of his own time.
It is art itself, Zeki adds — describing a demanding and accurate aesthetics of his own — that can be defined following the example of sight and its biologic function. Sight is basically a process of selection and singling out of constants aimed at knowledge — art is the same. It is in this sense that two aesthetics, so different the one from the other like Platonic and Hegelian ones — strict censor of the double and pauperizing artistic mimesis the former, celebrator of its absolute power the latter — can be reconciled; for art is — as Plato would have wished and in spite his own beliefs — the quest towards essentialness, and for this very reason, representative particularization of the universal. The brain builds up an idea of object or situation, which comes from its experiences of many objects and situations, experiences it collects into a synthesis of object and “ideal” situation. Yet everyday experience of single objects or situations may not satisfy the more global synthetic idea, bringing about as a result brain’s everlasting dissatisfaction.
The creative challenge may profit — and has profited — from such dissatisfaction. A way to come close to the idea existing in the brain, is to leave the artwork unfinished, just like Michelangelo did, who did not finish three-fifth of his works. In this case, the observer can finish it in different ways, and that’s the very benefit. Once Schopenhauer wrote that you have to leave your mind with something it can do, better if it is the last thing — for this reason we admire Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures or many paintings by Cézanne.
Note that we are conscious of a single interpretation a time, and this brings about a key ambiguity factor, which is a precious feature in works of art and creativity. In its neurologic definition, ambiguity is not the indeterminacy or uncertainty we find in dictionaries — just the opposite. It is certainty of numerous interpretations mutually diverging the one from the other, each of which dominates for a moment.
As such a defined answer does not exist, for all answers are plausible alike. For the ambiguous and the unfinished can satisfy the brain more than some thorough completeness. Imaging studies reveal that when we watch ambiguous shapes, brain activity’s focus moves from an area under frontal lobe’s control.
Only recently art has been systematically investigated through the conceptual tools supplied by evolution theory. As cultural expression subject to great unsteadiness, even on an individual level, aesthetic perception, along with artistic creation, has been considered a phenomenon, which is hard to refer to brain biology, and in its rising, to Homo Sapiens Sapiens’ phylogeny. Contemporary approaches to art which seem to refer more directly to neo-Darwinian synthesis are two — evolutionary psychology and neuroaesthetics. Evolutionary psychology aims at justifying a great number of human phenomena, by basing on the general evolutionary theory. Especially two scholars, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, pioneers of the discipline, aim at building up a psychological basis of culture. Their main premise lays in the fact that human nature is universal, and that nonetheless such universality finds its expression first and foremost in psychological mechanisms resulting form evolution, and not from cultural expressed behaviors. So cultural changeability does not contradict universality, it is rather a collection of data allowing to better understand the structure of underlying psychological mechanisms. The second assumption rests on the fact that psychological mechanisms resulting from evolution are adaptations, shaped by natural selection on the long run. “Aesthetic” perception is not a negligible sub-product of selection, but rather a precise adaptation answer, yet originated in the environment where our hunter-picker forefathers got evolved over two millions years.
Instead, as we have seen in Zeki, neuro-aesthetics moves from new knowledge onto brain functioning, from general architecture to physiology of perception, to explain aesthetic experience in terms of neurobiology, and not of commonsense psychology or philosophy (as traditional aesthetics does). Studies about sight are paradigmatic, starting from David Hubel’s and Torsten Wiesel’s singling out of cells which respond to differently oriented lines.
Starting from such results, other neurophysiologists, particularly Semir Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran are trying to single out brain areas “ascribed” to art. And then, from there, hark back to their evolutionary history.
There are, eventually, approaches which do not exclude phenomenology, and the first-person approach, by matching it with neurosciences and evolutionism. Special attention shall go to the neo-jamesian recovery of the distinction of fringes and nucleus in the mental conceptualization, aimed at suggesting a peculiar reading of art’s genesis and function.
“Art, just like every human activity — morality, law and religion included — depends on brain’s laws and complies to them”. (S. Zeki, “Journal of Consciousness Studies”, 2002).
According to him, to understand what art is, what makes it so important and what makes an artist better than another one, you cannot but refer to the part of the brain where art gets created and appreciated. Even if neural bases of the subject’s artistic creativity and appreciation of artworks are not fully known, the massive improvements achieved in the knowledge of brain areas ascribed to sight, have allowed to start formulating some neural laws, which ground art and aesthetics.
Zeki suggests that we see with our brain, not with our eyes: eyes are nothing but filters through which visual signals pass and get addressed to brain visual areas.
Therefore sight is a process of selection and of finding out crucial information aimed at knowledge. Through his visual frame, the artist gets to know reality and makes his own ideas (for instance an idea of love, of a natural landscape, of a straight line), that he then represent in his works. Also he who benefits from the work of art similarly relies on a visual system to sketch his own idea of beauty according to which he will appreciate the artwork or not. Through neuroaesthetics, Zeki has opened the way to a totally unexplored research field, where art gets investigated on the basis of the study of neurobiological mechanisms, which affect brain functioning; moreover, by stressing that art results from brain and complies with its laws, neuroaesthetics has the line between art and science grown thinner and thinner. The visual perception shall not be held as a mere recognition of the objects forming the physical world. This is immediately all-clear by watching images where our visual system perceives objects which are not physically there. Among the most renowned examples, Kanitza’s triangle, in which we see a white triangle covering three circles, and the triangle, which we likewise perceive as protruding from the sheet, is not physically there, just perceptively. The phenomenal world we perceive does not clearly consist of physical objects that surround us, it rather results from a number of considerations, performed by the retina and cortex’s visual areas. Studying the way information spread all over our visual cortex gets organized to shape objects’ representation is therefore prerequisite. Over the trajectory from the physical object to the observer, light radiations are completely independent among each other. On its turn the retina consists of a patchwork of histologically separate elements. Over this process, the original object’s unity gets completely lost, but in the end, the object appears again, on a perceptive level, as a unitary presence. How is this re-construction possible? This process is known as perceptual grouping, and has been widely investigated by no less than two different standpoints: on the one hand it has been a research topic of Gestalt experimental psychology, as an attempt at singling out phenomenal laws of perceptual organization; on the other, neuro-physiological studies have focused on the recovery of the biological functions underlying the grouping process.
Music is another fascinating example of the use of brain conceptions, or rather, of one brain conception disappointed by everyday experience. Wagner wrote Tristan and Isolde with a single aim, that he confessed to Liszt: “Since I have not been able to experience the true happiness of love in my all life, I mean to compose the grandest monument to the grandest illusion”. The illusion is, as we know, a product of the brain. Opera provides quite a few interesting aspects for a neurobiologist, although here I just mean to draw the attention on the unsolved lines — to be solved at the end — and on the long silences, which brought a critic to wonder: “whoever composed more beautiful silences than Wagner?”. From a neurobiologic perspective, they are two features allowing listener’s imagination and creativity to be involved in the opera.
ART HISTORY
In Art History, contemporary art rediscovers, just like in Leonardo da Vinci’s times, a different “Reality” — the microscopic reality of quanta and of chaos, as afore-explained.
It is recognized that every time and every culture are marked by a different aesthetic view, that is, by a different analogy to beauty, taste and well-being. As a matter of fact, “aesthetics” comes from Greek aisthetikos, “sensitive”, and from aisthanesthai, “perceive”. It therefore defines that “forma mentis” corresponding to the chance to highlight an historically selective faculty which, by mingling mind and emotion, credits visual and perceptual impressions originated from any event that can be set in the referring frame of space and time. So the conceptions of time and space are so crucial in the culture of any era, that any change they experience thoroughly modifies the grounding criteria upon which our world’s view rests.
As a consequence, culture acquired in any era and from any cultural ethnicity, becomes all-important in defining the main lines of the “aesthetics”, which regularly characterize both assessment criteria of scientific rationality and assessment criteria of beauty in art.
So conceptions regarding time and space are fundamental to outline the imaginary background in which any element of aesthetic appreciation is assessed rationally and emotionally.
We actually note that in the historic era which marked the rural civilization, the passing of time was considered “cyclic”, in relation to the need of contemplating a time for sowing and a time for harvest. In that historic time art was not intended as creative autonomous reality, but rather as a display of abilities grounded on the imitation and contemplation of nature as divine creation associated to an allegoric cyclicity of the repetitive passing of life and death. Middle Age key expressive frames actually symbolize life’s transience in becoming over the seasons in juxtaposition to death’s and afterlife’s eternity. In the early Renaissance, conceptuality with regards to time and space happened to change along with the developments of mechanic conceptions, which led to craftsmanship. The need to accurately measure machines’ gears brought to the need of defining in detail objects’ location in the space. So after the coming-up of time-and-space mechanic idea, Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) had already expressed an accurate definition of perspective in painting aesthetics in his book titled “De Prospectiva Pingendi”. Leonardo da Vinci improved the foundations of “descriptive geometry”, as investigation of objective representation in tridimensional space, which are the basis of Renaissance painting technique. As such “geometric perspective” outlines the passing-by from a cyclic idea of time to a new linear dimension of it, which will be a benchmark of Mechanic Science over the whole development of Industrial Age. Then Classic Physics came to an idea of Time as definitely apart from Space, where time dimension had been basically held as subjective, and thus conventionally measurable by a clock, in the light of an outer space definable in its objective dimension. So Descartes’ structure of space and time, both considered as independent factors, grounded on a clear-cut and arbitrary distinction between subject and object, by going beyond the conception supported by Renaissance, which put man at the center of the capacity of cognitive integration. So stabilization of mechanic conceptuality gave rise to the separation of two cultures, scientific and artistic-humanist, which ruled over the Industrial Age.
Along the industrial development especially, “photography” could mechanically exploit what had come out from the expression of projection optics, by basing the photographic process on a conception implying rays of light coming from any light source, which gather, through a lens, on a photographic plate. In this way the photo-pressing has been invented according to the approximation arisen from the early perspective sight of lightning reality. At the beginning of the past century the printed image had already improved by the fixing techniques featured by movie films, and this has obviously contributed to a deep change in the painting style of Cubism, which Pablo Picasso started in 1907 with the famous painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (New York, Museum of Modern Art) — a crucial artwork for the future change in the representation of Time-and-Space in modern art. This painting is seen as the beginning of the deep change affecting figurative art, in that it suggests a sharp getting-over based on the geometric aesthetics of perspective; in the afore-said painting, it is clear how space and time are disassembled into two-dimensional volumes, apart yet “simultaneously” perceived from the different standpoints pertaining to the different observers. “Information simultaneity” is actually conceptual core which run through science over the entire 19th Century, by breaking up its different approaches into irreconcilable sections as Relativistic Mechanics (RM) and Quantum Mechanics (QM) in Physics. For Relativistic Mechanics suggested by Albert Einstein as special relativity (1905), only the fact that the speed of light has an absolute and constant value is accepted; so time and space become relative and mutually changeable, because they happen to depend on the Observers’ viewpoints. Therefore at the same time as “Cubism”, also relativity in science questions going beyond traditional conception of classic physics. In this way it passes from the traditional conception of time and space as two mutually independent, absolute entities, to a continuous “quadri-vector chronotope” dynamic system, in which space and time can change geometries and mutual dimensions. So Euclidean space bends and time contracts. Such an RM position leads to various paradoxes, the most renowned of which being the so-called “twins paradox”, which probably persuaded Salvador Dalì to represent time’s relativistic flexibility in the panting “Melting Clocks”.
Einstein’s generalization of sight’s relativity principle prevents simultaneous events to occur, since every possible event is “localizable” in a univocal structuring of the “quadri-vector” as definable from three dimensions of Space and one dimension of Time.
Instead of focusing onto the Macroscopic world as RM does, Quantum Mechanics ends up solving the experimental fact that light particles (photons), like sound particles (phonons) and also electrons, etc., appear to behave simultaneously both as Waves and as Particles. The issue of behavior “simultaneity” sharply clashes with the localization chance of measures. Just like Zeno of Elea’s (c.a. 490 b.C.) arrow paradox, if we want to measure speed and position simultaneously, we have first to stop the arrow to tell exactly its position, and then look at its speed without changing its trajectory.
Hence in the case too of dualism between localizable particle and de-localized wave, the conjugated quantities, though being simultaneously there, bring about indeterminacy of measurement, as stated by Werner Heisemberg (1927) with the QM principle. As a fact, keeping the space-and-time structure unaltered was considered necessary: the only way to knowledge in the microcosm was the “probabilistic” one.
The resulting fracture from reason and physic reality, with the “Indeterminacy Principle” actually tackles the issue of scientific realism status — apparently sensible — in which outer reality is considered objective, no matter the thinking subject; such an approach actually brought to paradoxical conclusions. Seen that QM reality can be effectively known only beyond indeterminacy, that is to say only when localization in space becomes measurable, Ervin Schrodinger articulated a further reflection known as “Schrodinger’s Cat” paradox.
The poor cat, caged in a box, if “unobserved” may seem “dead or alive at the same time”. So in QM’s probabilistic interpretation, when nobody watches it, the cat exists in a “superposition state” where it has 50% probability of being both dead and alive. So in QM, the cat may simultaneously exist or not exist in a “complementary sight”, held true by QM. Only if it gets observed, the box opened, it is possible to know whether it is effectively alive or dead.
“A paradox is an apparently realistic reasoning, that starts from sensible premises and comes to a conclusion, which clashes with the premises”.
When it happens, we have to go through the grounding criteria which we held as unalterable, and adopt a new idea of reality. So nowadays we have to accept to change the cognitive paradigm, which dogmatically makes the time-and-space structure unaltered. The various paradoxes discussed in the context of science and 20th Century artistic representations have indicated the need for art and science to reconcile within a renewed unitary paradigmatic criteria, just like it happened in the Renaissance, when a sharp correspondence between art and science in the unification of cognitive and aesthetic foundations was detected, for man was considered at the centre of the cognitive process.
Thus contemporary art and science shall go beyond mechanic reductionism basically suggested from the possibility to objectively watch the outer world without realizing of being part of it. The renewed expressions of our age’s aesthetic feeling have led to a distinct “interdisciplinary” reconciliation and to a wide opposition between art and science. Technological evolution of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has allowed to re-organize relations between art and science within the simulations of the scientific imagery through the expression of state-of-the-art “Digit-Art” activities. With the computer’s help, artists benefit from a wide range of software, which have helped the coming-up of new techniques capable of fostering artist’s creativity, who becomes himself, through Generative-Art, inventor of algorithms and software — definitely all-important to perform scientific simulations — that allowed computerized visualization of nanotechnologies.
In this way deepness of visual perception, negotiated by the development of high-resolution optic technologies, has recently allowed to manufacture nanostructures which, thanks to new image techniques become the new manufacturing reality, and open a new sensitivity and contemplation on reductionism, separating objective reality from the ideas, with which the new nano-reality gets viewed and manipulated within the film of hidden space-and-time.
ECONOMICS
In modern economics, materialist culture generating property as synonym of market (from physical space to goods’ sale process) prevailed, but nowadays markets make way to nets, and property is replaced by access; exchange on buyers’ and sellers’ property stock market is the hub of economic life no more.
Private property does not disappear, but is exchanged, the supplier keeps the good’s property, yet he leaves it in temporary usufruct to the client/server, on payment of a rate, rental or enrolment fee or information desirable to the market.
Nowadays Google and Facebook are current market’s valuable pieces and respond to that very philosophy. Nanosecond is access culture as capital is in property culture. But trends show that property of physical goods tends to be considered expense rather than wealth.
Nowadays intellectual capital is the overruling power — just think about the transaction between Obama and FIAT. FIAT’s intellectual capital has been the Italian group’s success factor, and has been considered more important than Crysler’s wealth.
The long-run trend of the long-run’s system will be the replacement of industrially-manufactured goods and services with the cultural experiences exchange (travels and global tourism, theme-parks and theme-towns, fun- and wellness-specialized centers, fashion and restaurants, professional sport, music, cinema television, art, virtual world, cyber-space and electronic entertainment). Devastating side-effects for the future civilization take on shape: the economic field has always been drawn from the cultural one, which on its turn has always determined shared behavior rules.
But now?
Restoring a balance between culture power and economics power will be the century’s crucial dilemma. For instance, how to protect and foster cultural differences. 21th century men shall see themselves as integral knots of an interests’ shared net, and not as autonomous agents of a Darwinian world struggling for survival anymore. Pc shall be as vital as the printing press in knowledge building; from work commodification we will move towards entertainment commodification. Old industry principles will give way to the new values of cultural capitalism, which will push cultural domain into the empire of economics. Culture will be the overruling value. For this reason greater finance has turned to the last, still-independent sector of human activity — culture.
Electronic nets allowing access to an ever-increasing number of experiences are controlled by a limited number of multinational media powers. History records no precedents of such a wider power in human communications. Gatekeepers set terms and conditions according to which billions of people will have the chance to interact in the coming future. The economic and social gap among people grows and grows relentlessly. One-fifth of mankind is migrating to the cyber-space, whereas the others are stuck in the caves of poverty and often starve to death. In internet era more than half population has never used a phone, but if the gap between the haves and the have-nots is wide, the gap between the connected and not-connected will be even wider. Access to the net has apparently become the necessary way to progress and personal satisfaction.
The new scenarios of fights/agreements among major financial groups to control Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube and other social network, prove what afore-said. For many people internet holds the same evocative power the democratic vision used to have in the past. So a powerful conceptual tool to re-shape a view of the world is the new era’s most successful metaphor.
PHILOSOPHY
In the Western philosophy of the past two centuries, ideologies and political — and even religious — movements, despite rare exceptions, have bowed their heads to materialist culture: Enlightenment, Socialism and Liberalism included.
What do we mean by “materialist culture”?
Superiority of economics upon man and nature, of determinism upon indeterminacy, of causality upon complementariness, of order upon chaos, of endlessness of progress upon its limitations, have been icons upon which mankind’s lives got built through the Modern Age. The economic triad, science and communication, has trained us to the alluring and self-destructive procedure of manufacturing and consuming.
As ABO poignantly writes: “Manufacturing from advertising’s trick gives rise to a kind of hunger, an unquenchable longing for objects of consumption. But the situation gets reverted: now it is the object that chases the subject. Manufacturing opens its sadistic hunting season on the individual. In this, there is a roles inversion now, and a new hierarchy of positions, where man finds himself in the middle”.
Andy Warhol has been the greatest theorist as well as practitioner of materialist art. “I believe that all paintings should have same sizes and same colors. In this way they could be interchangeable and nobody would have a painting better than, or worse than, someone else”, claimed our Andy.
The work of art becomes a space marked by technical reproductibility. Society is not a space for freedom but for trade. “Business art is a step above art”, proclaimed Pittsburgh’s Peter Pan. The balance of social indifference has been compass for this, by assuming the macroscopic natural order as insuperable. It did not catch on following Buddhist thinking: “Only after being free from any conventional power, we can be enlightened”. Everything was leveled, standardized, homologated, justified, ordered. Yet recent discoveries have revealed that chaos does exist, that it is the commonest situation in nature, whereas order is relatively rare, and can be upset by the smallest perturbation.
Order looks like a drunk man tiptoeing on a classic dancer’s pointe shoes.
Chaos is an hippopotamus sunk in the mud. The question is learning how to control it, and understand its inner dynamics, to exploit its endless creativity.
Nature itself adopts chaos as integral part of its evolution plan. To solve the problem of adjusting survival life forms in a complex, ever-changing, apparently chaotic environment, every deterministic plan would be doomed to failure.
So nature chooses to fight chaos through chaos, by begetting a host of life-forms through casual mutations.
Materialist plan’s strictness has gone out of kilter, like a flipper.
Who tries to restore it, is wasting our time and chances.
Materialism has run out of propelling boost: the sooner we realize that, the better.
ART
In quantum mechanics, matter’s double nature matches an artwork’s double nature. A photon is simultaneously particle and wave just like a work of art comes out to be both a series of structural relations (a system of neurological, psychological and physical processes) and of special objects (the artwork).
The mystics Kandinskij, Klee and Mondrian, who “wanted to tear apart the veil that sensible appearance dropped, to reach some higher truth”, had sensed the process. It is of course a conceptual, rather than a physical, dualism. How can it be that diametrically opposed models may coexist without suffering any cognitive dissonance?
Niels Bohr — among quantum mechanics’ founders — points out the solution: to accept the paradox.
Let us take the representatives, who are most devoted to digital art research. They exploit web’s double ontology by recurring to the various interactivity levels within a single project. As a consequence, borders between internet virtual world and human bodies’ definite reality mix together. The same borders’ intermingling — ontological dualism itself — is to be found in quantum mechanics, according to which a photon is both a quantum wave and a sub-atomic particle.
To grasp digital media’s materiality of the immaterial, or immateriality of the material, one shall abandon all ultimatums and adopt an opposite logic, typical of complementariness’ conceptual dualism.
A work of art relying on interactive media — just like a quantum system —is both material and immaterial; it is characterized both by stillness (code) and dynamism of code interpretation (functioning program), the same way a photon is both a measurable object (particle) and an array of virtual particles (probabilistic wave function).
Roy Ascott maintains that: “Art has turned away from forms’ behavior to devote to behavior’s forms”.
Of course the passion art feels for forms has not completely disappeared, but it is undeniable that new artistic currents claim new rules to follow. This does not wipe away formalism, in the same way as quantum mechanics does not discredit the Newtonian approach. It depends on the context, which the observer finds himself into. Different contexts call for different criteria. The development of complex phenomena, such as cognitive philosophy, is carried out on the system’s level, rather than on the objects’. You shall focus on ideas.
“Conceptual art definition opens to artistic expressions, which cannot be judged and understood according to definite and known products, but to procedures and processes, just like it happens with other media. In other words, the change that this term introduces, concerns not only art form and subject, but also its very structure”. Rolf Wederer upon conceptual art, at the opening of exhibition “Konzeption/Conception” (1969).
John Cage cleared up the idea: “Conceptual art is an art, whose subject matter is concepts, as sound is subject matter of music”.
Nowadays we understand that time-and-space codification of rhythms and vocal harmonies depend on a self-organized modulation system of information signals coded by brain activity in order to generate audible sound perceptions.
Phones — the smallest units of a phoneme — are linked to a phonon’s multiple entanglement process, that is to say energy quanta correlating waves associated to quantum particles, generating as such a unit, which takes on the properties of information simultaneous exchange through the entire environment where voice stems from, which can be also synchronically organized as song.
Every road leads to quantum.
The idea of complementariness, introduced by quantum mechanics, represents a model for comprehending the conceptual dualism of both realities, the physical and the virtual.
To understand the implications in art, let us think at the observer’s new role, and at what Gadamer and Levi Strauss analyzed.
The idea of aesthetic event postulated by H.G. Gadamer states that a work of art does not exist thanks to its gross materialness, but rather to the immaterial processes of information and interpretation it brings into action.
We get here to the principle of indifference, which appeared in art history together with Modern Age. It is actually Modern Age, that brings about lack of involvement towards natural events in the making of an artwork. Manet’s young prostitute Olimpia is Impressionism’s manifesto. This very canvas actually highlights the lack of involvement with reality: Manet could have depicted his model as a crooked, sick and vicious being. He did just the opposite: he did not partake emotionally in what he was painting, and he portrayed her just as painters could have portrayed a countess’ nude till the century before. So this painting brought forth that process of non-involvement which would later become one of the main features of modern and contemporary art.
Impressionism used to take a “piece of reality” away from the work of art, and spotlighted the way to make every artist’s artwork distinctive. It was the beginning of Modern Age.
But where is the agent which brought about the non-involvement process expressed in the principle of indifference?
It is in the artist’s personal view, not only upon art, but also upon life and world. In this way the artist becomes observer once again, by taking agency delegations away from museums, art galleries, dealers and art critics.
A quantum view of art re-evaluates the very conception of doubling. With his Bottle-rack, Duchamps asked himself a question nobody will ever answer: “What is a work of art?”.
“If I take a bottle-rack from a wine seller, if I sign it and place it into an art gallery, would it become a work of art?”. Yes, it would, because the given bottle-rack would undergo what Surrealists called “estrangement”, that is, the transliteration of the real: that object would not be meant to drain bottles anymore, and would become a unity of forms.
Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss held a lecture about Duchamps’ bottle-rack, and stated that it was no more what it had been assembled for, but it was rather a ghost, something suggesting and inferring to something else, and that for this reason it stirred up emotion. Such an emotion proves that an object’s estrangement may generate a work of art.
Yet the idea of estrangement has nothing to do with the materiality of an artwork. Only by adopting the principle of complementariness, estrangement can be understood and proven.
If these thoughts make sense, then modern and contemporary art history’s milestones have to be questioned. For the time being, we list them, and later on we will go through them in detail: more than enough is too much, value of a work of art, from market to access, from nature/particle to nature/wave, from object to process, from reproductibility to uniqueness.
More than enough is too much
Nowadays art’s belly is full, stuffed, constipated.
Millions artists, thousands galleries, thousands dealers, thousands curators, journalists, magazines, trade-shows, museums.
A tangle mass of hungry mouths ready to devour each other for a piece of belly, yet always doomed to reach the rectum.
It will take time, but we know what such tangle mass will become.
Two dates will give an idea of this mega-trend.
September 16, 2008
Damien Hirst sells straight on the market for USD 200 millions.
Bye bye Gagosian, White Cube and Art basel.
April 25, 2009
Victor Pinchuk opens his personal Museum in Kiev, hosting 200 works by Damien Hirst. The collector, by breaking up habits and hierarchies, wants to be considered the new Prince.
The main actor is the collector, which relies, from time to time, to artists. Danger and opportunity, it always depends from the new Middle Ages’ points of view. Everything lying in-between collector and artist — from galleries to trade-shows — does not count anymore, and therefore is doomed to get changed or disappear, since both the producer (artist) and the final consumer (collector) take it as outdated.
There will be a massive selection, which will be managed by money.
Contemporary art quotations will keep exceed ancient and modern art ones.
Unimaginable prices will be reached.
Money will be the greater sieve to select artists.
Of course this does not mean that the best artists will be credited. The other way round. At this stage artists actually wag their tails around, more concerned of going to the cashier’s than down in history.
But billionaire too will get tired of throwing their money into the loo.
And then they will understand that there is another way of being owners, apart from money: allowing access to high-quality artworks to millions, billions clients. The property of an artwork becomes a way to nationalize beauty’s enjoyment. This will make the new aesthetic values clearer and clearer.
Only those artists who shall guarantee quality will be credited. Quality means artists working on the process rather than on the product, and artists that produce less, well and unique pieces. The age of reproductibility (and maybe of artworks’ physicality) is archeology.
After all we have to consider a logistics issue. Where are we going to physically put the works of art which will be made at an exponential rhythm (see the number of aspiring artists, that come out every year from Academies and Universities worldwide)?
Shall we plan artworks’ incinerators (to Marinetti’s and Futurists’ happiness)?
Everything leads us think to a new system.
We will pass from the current Prozac Art — exciting to be convincing — to creative Brunello di Montalcino, from the physical to the connected city. He who does not understand that this wave will upset the art world, will have better change career.
So are we going to go back to elites?
This is the trend. After all nowadays only million-dollar artists are sold. Contemporary art has become a financial product, with its pros and cons. The greatest danger is that it may turn into a speculation bubble.
At the moment there are two categories of collectors: predators and entrepreneurs.
The former catch hold of, and take pleasure in, the conquering/predatory act. The latter take pleasure in the aesthetic quality of the artwork they invest into.
I focus on the former’s re-education, and above all to the entrepreneurs — I leave to auction houses those who take Cattelan’s work for a depressed cats’ playground.
Moving from the object to the process shall allow to overcome the historic gap between visual art and performing art, by realizing that the latter will draw the former. Artistic objects will be traded no more; unique and unrepeatable events will take place; physical exchange will give way to virtual access; the local event will give way to the global.
Major sport, music, religious and politic events have opened this way. The technological tool itself will undergo a change, moving from flat image (television) to three-dimensional image (hologram).
The passage from the information era to an era of educated enjoyment or knowledge entertainment, presumes the passage from information to multi-media communication, from spectator to actor, from the idea of mere using to the exciting idea of co-producing.
Hologram will allow to overcome the conception of passive usability, by ascribing the same value to the physical as well as virtual presence.
Think about huge pop gatherings or raves.
The current model is based on enjoyableness of physical presence and of the social behavior concerning frenzy.
In art, it is the model of major exhibitions and grand museum/fair events. Such models are too basic and age-old in the globalization era.
It means thinking about a model of few artistic events, but with a planetary echo, by recurring to new ways of contemporariness, internet and hologram.
Television shall comply with them.
Few un-reproducible yet enjoyable and interactive events with billions people around.
Huge multi-media platforms which will carry around art goods. In this way the danger of a monopolist management of contemporary art market will be avoided.
It will be like in the web market: few monopolists fighting against each other to control the economics of knowledge. Of course the risk of an Orwellian control increases, but the man has always found the way to break free from slaveries old an new.
And nowadays too web monopolists without our access would become other speculation bubbles, because in the economics of knowledge, the value lays in the collective as well as in the individual mind, and without our minds, their cyber-economy would turn into digital trash.
New revolutions will move from the control of material production media to the control of social re-production media, and of production of knowledge.
New york, October 2009
