I've followed the various conversations so far with interest.
I have a few thoughts and they don't exactly follow any current thread.
Sorry if this seems confusing.
1. On the topic of how scientific knowledge of the brain will or should
affect working artists: Why should it? That is, I don't understand
David's (I think) apparent assumption that artists are working
irrationally if they don't know about the brain, that they are then simply
following convention unthinkingly. Consider a parallel example of an
athlete studying with a kinesiologist, say, a major league baseball player
learning how to improve his arm muscles and so on to have greater hitting
or pitching power. Yes, this is done now and is helpful, but there's more
to baseball than this knowledge. The arm and muscles are tools, but the
ball player also participates in a game with history, context, rules,
traditions, etc., something complexly socialand cultural. Knowledge of
the tool does not somehow remove him from this game (nor from wanting to
play in it). I'd think much the same would be true of an artist who comes
to learn more about the eyes, music and aural perception, the brain, and
so on. These are tools or mediums but there is also a whole complex
cultural context out there, the "artworld."
That brings me to point 2. I am hearing a lot of complaints about
critics. I'd like to urge that we not generalize about either artists or
critics. Sure, some critics spout jargon, but not all. Some critics seem
to ignore the visual for the narrative, but not all. I'd cite Arthur
Danto as a case in point, a prominent philosopher and critic, someone who
writes clearly and is not on the po-mo bandwagon. It would be easy for me
as a philosopher and sometimes critic to make gross generalizations about
artists: artists are anti-intellectual, they are slaves to the ideology
of expressing themselves even when they have nothing to express, they seem
to learn or know little about art history even in their own field, they
only know their own art form and not any others (dancers do not know about
visual art, musicians do not know about painting, etc. etc.). I repeat, I
*could* say all this and sometimes am tempted to--I am teaching a class in
aesthetics populated by young art students in every art field who fulfill
all these stereotypes, alas. But I know that not all artists are like
this. A musician can astound me with insights about Homer's poetry,
another working photographer might be quite knowledgeable about visual
perception, and so on; I think it's really pointless to speak in terms of
generalities.
Finally, for this message, point 3. Some of you know about the home page
maintained here at University of Houston for Cognitive Science,
Humanities, and the Arts, but if you don't, I would like to recommend it:
http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/index.html. If you look at the page called
"introduction to key topics in cognitive science and the arts" you will
see various ones listed and I'd love to hear reactions or suggestions.
Just to mention something from there, the topic of language is one I'd
like to hear discussed more on this list. I don't mean only language as
used in literature (let's remember poetry and theater and literature while
we are remembering music along with the standard visual arts--and film
too!) but also the whole question of whether any account of the mental
processing of arts, whether music, film, or painting, shold be understood
either as being on a par with or very similar to or based on or totally
distinct from understanding verbal language. Film theory, which is the
field I'm most familiar with, has many proponents of the view that film
has a language and that we somehow read or decode this language in
watching films. Yet this view has been roundly attacked by a prominent
cognitive scientist working in the field, Gregory Currie. Here is a
summary I've written about this issue and how Currie treats it:
http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/currie.html.
All best wishes,
Cynthia Freeland
Philosophy
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3785
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