What Exactly is Art?

Aug 3

Whenever I ask people what they think art is, they all seem to have their own unique answer. What are the potential consequences of such pervasive ambiguity and can we make sense of this tangled situation?

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ibid

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— Media —

m1. wikimedia file: Apollo_11_launch,_video_of_engines_at_500_fps_(camera_E-8).ogv

VIDEO: high speed footage of the Apollo 11 launch (camera E-8)
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m2. wikipedia file: David_(Michelangelo).stl

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m3. apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html

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Apollo 9 photos
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Apollo 15 photos
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m4. dissectpodcast.com/because-the-internet-screenplay-Act-iii/

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m5. youtu.be/U9_z_uYT19A

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m7. esahubble.org/images/potw2020a

PHOTO: Stellar Glitter in a Field of Black
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PHOTO: Publicity photo of Carl Sagan
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m9. loc.gov/item/cosmos000110

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m12. loc.gov/pictures/item/2016815976

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m14. press.philamuseum.org/asset/346550/duchampimage8-societyofindependents

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m16. press.philamuseum.org/asset/346543/duchampimage3-roche-duchampsstudio

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m17. sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/blindman/2/index.htm

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m28.

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timecode 32:39

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transcript

Imagine the confusion my distant ancestors would feel if I were to stand here and tell them that art is one of humanity's greatest tools.

They, who never knew that light could be tamed or that touching glass could make fresh food appear at your home, or that fire could push us to the moon.

Yet smearing pigment on cloth, something that they invented long ago, this is just as valuable and something that should still be cherished.

Yes, it will decay and be forgotten as all things eventually must.

Hell, I couldn't even tell them what art is, but I would still insist that it's a triumph of our species.

Such as the peril of art.

Something so elusive and powerful is ripe for being extolled for dubious and mystical reasons.

We love to mythologize it because we recognize it, but don't understand it.

Art almost seems to take on a dreamlike quality.

There's a certainty as you experience it, but in its absence...

the concept seems to slip through your grasp and evaporate into some imperceptible form.

And it's finished!

Perfect.

Now, let's take this painting, for instance.

Is this art?

You probably want to see it.

Well, you probably already have a pretty good idea just by taking a look at it.

I, however, don't need to look at it.

I know for certain.

What about this painting determines whether it is art or not?

Well, that's what I'm hoping we will be able to figure out.

Oh!

Uh...

No, this?

It's su--it's supposed to do that.

This is fine.

I think this is what they call artistic intent.

Uh...

It just sort of adds to the experience.

I wonder if it's too late to return it.

Seems bad.

Oh.

Okay.

I'm just?

That's somebody else's problem right now.

Before we try to better understand art, we must first ask a very important question.

How do we even know that art exists to begin with?

It may seem like an absurd question.

How could art not exist?

But it's essential to consider, because if we have reason to believe that art does exist, then that might give us a lead to investigate further.

And if it doesn't exist, then this will just be a short video.

Don't look at the runtime.

Now I'm sure some folks might reason that art must exist because we believe it exists.

It's a social construct of sorts.

Now, there may be some merit to this, but I have a problem with using it as our primary evidence.

To show you what I mean, let's compare it to another social construct: the value of currency.

Let's say I'm selling frozen bananas and I price the banana at ten dollars.

I'm not just setting the value of the banana.

I'm also setting the value of a dollar.

You're money has a transactional value.

While you hold onto it, the money has no transactional value because you haven't spent it, but if you choose to buy the banana you lock in that value by agreeing to the conditions of the exchange.

It requires both parties to agree that your ten dollars was worth a banana for it to become a socially constructed truth.

But this is not how art seems to work.

Something does not become less art to me because banana stand guy thought that something wasn't art.

Every individual has their own independent metric by which art is determined.

Now, I genuinely don't intend for this to be a trick question.

So what makes us think that art probably exists?

As best as I can tell, the reason we think that art must exist, is because we can feel it.

I think of it much like dark matter.

Evidence points to it likely existing because we see the effect it has on other things.

We never see dark matter itself, and I suspect art is a bit similar.

Instead of seeing the effects on far distant galaxies, it's much smaller, much more personal.

We can feel art effecting ourselves, both emotionally short-term and more long-term, with how it influences our identities.

We haven't been able to capture whatever that elusive substance is that's causing this feeling.

When you're listening to music, you can't exactly just squeeze an oily plasma out of the air and pour it into a vial so that we may more closely examine the essence of art.

But believe me, I have tried.

However, I think this feeling is enough to establish that something is probably happening here.

And somehow art, whatever it may be, evokes a feeling whenever we encounter it.

Saying that art evokes a feeling is pretty vague.

So let's establish a baseline frame of reference.

I am sitting in a dark room wishing I had brought a jacket.

Rows of chairs surround me, all of which are empty, except for one.

Behind me a man wearing glasses quietly reads a newspaper.

I don't know how.

It's so dark.

And in front of the both of us is a forty-foot screen demanding our attention.

But he's determined.

We were there to see Apollo 11.

A very matter-of-fact documentary using archival footage from the mission.

It depicted those events moment-to-moment with no narration.

The movie left me in a state of awe.

Now, some of this was just me being impressed by the coverage of the footage.

This wasn't just televised news conferences.

There was some real work put into this.

It was clearly shot to be a movie.

But the feeling ran deeper than just a bit of production admiration.

The Apollo 11 mission was an important milestone.

As far as we know, it's the first time that any creature from this planet ever touched another celestial body.

For some reason, this moment seems to be relegated to bland history books, a few iconic photos and one particular soundbyte.

But this documentary humanized it for me.

I understood it emotionally in a way that I never did before.

I felt a connection to our shared past.

I considered the lives of the bystanders nearby who watched the launch.

I noticed the lack of diversity in the command center.

I saw all of these moments filled with nuance that told a bigger story.

Moments, like all moments in life, that, too, would have fallen victim to ephemerality and washed away in time were it not for this film.

My entire life, this beautiful footage was kept hidden in a dark container in the National Archives basement.

But in the glow of its revival, I felt it.

I was humbled.

I suddenly felt the boundary of human capability stretch just a little bit further.

I felt a connection that I never do in my day to day life.

And not just to the people I love, but also to the people I loathe.

To the vast family of folks I've never even met, and yes, even a little bit to the newspaper guy.

If art exists, I cannot escape the conclusion that this must have been one such instance.

But art is not strictly the domain of the theater.

It can be found in many different places and feel like many different things.

I felt it when I listened to the album Because the Internet after I had moved out to live on my own for the first time, it shaped my worldview by guiding me to questions about value.

I felt it when I listened to To Pimp a Butterfly, which gave me a glimpse into some of the internal and external turbulence that somebody might experience while being lured into the traps of a system designed against you.

I felt it when I played Outer Wilds and experienced an overwhelming sense of wonder, pride, and a longing sadness for characters in a world that never existed outside of my computer.

I felt it just recently watching Dijon's live performance of his song Many Times.

And while I have a difficult time finding the words to describe exactly how it makes me feel, the transformative feeling that it is art is unmistakable.

You can feel it in paintings, in architecture, photography, designed sneakers, tattoos, and origami, just to name a few common forms.

So even the feeling itself can vary.

But in my experience, the most potent art strikes me as a revelation.

It gives me access to something that was closed off before.

This specifically is what I'm measuring against, but everybody seems to have their own set of experiences that typifies what art can offer.

Now back to the question at hand.

What is art?

Well...

it's kind of a really big question, right?

But I have an idea on how to make it simpler to digest.

It's really quite simple.

We make the question shorter with fewer words.

Before we understand what "art" is we have to understand what "what is" is.

Of course, "what is" is a request for some identifier that helps separate art from literally everything else.

Now, I didn't quite realize this until I started thinking critically about it, but there exists many different types of definitions, and each one serves its own purpose.

It has some truth that it wants to say about the thing that it defines.

Let's take, for instance, the word Earth.

My carbon accountant, possibly an avid watcher of late nineties sitcoms, might define Earth as the third planet from the Sun.

This definition says something about our solar neighborhood.

It implies more planets.

It gives us a sense of where Earth exists and what type of object Earth is.

These are all true of Earth and useful to know.

But then some guy named Mr. S might define Earth as, "The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.

"The only home we've ever known." This says something about the relationship humans have with Earth and the relationship Earth has with our observations of the rest of the universe.

It says something about the habitability of Earth, the circumstance and good fortune it took to get here.

The limited reach and isolation of the creatures who live here and the rarity of that condition.

Again, these are all true of Earth.

Both definitions can be valid.

They just say different things about it.

A lot of folks probably default to dictionaries as the definitive place for definitions.

However, dictionary definitions serve their own very specific purpose.

They don't necessarily exist to give you all possible information about any given term.

Instead, they serve the function of giving the reader just enough information to be able to use the term in the appropriate context.

So when considering what is art?

First we have to establish what we want the purpose of our definition to be.

In all likelihood, I'm not going to be able to usurp everybody's working usage of the word art nor do I think that that should be the goal.

So to narrow down what truth I want this definition to reveal, I first have to consider why it's so important to me that we should define art.

So I read the book "What is Art?" Boy, I was this close to beating him to the punch.

130 years ago Tolstoy thought a whole lot about this, and he makes a great point about why it's so important to define art.

He also makes points that don't hold up quite as well.

But he's dead.

So let's let his prejudices die with him.

That's the one thing that really frightens me about immortality.

Anyway, he calls attention to the value we collectively attribute to art.

We have musicians who might dedicate their entire lives to the mastery of being able to pluck strings in just a specific way, or dancers who will move their bodies in a specific way, sometimes to the detriment of their own health and well-being.

We have game studios putting their employees through crunch an intense and sometimes devastating practice.

Presumably in the name of art.

We, as a whole, dedicate immense resources to the creation of art.

Some people gamble everything on their art.

However, if art is not well-defined, then we have a recipe for exploitation.

Tolstoy argues, and I'm inclined to agree that there's a certain moral imperative to disambiguate the term.

Somebody can leverage that ambiguity to further their own personal gain, no matter the cost.

After all, people will do a lot in the name of something great.

Establishing boundaries on art is one of many possible and necessary safeguards against this kind of exploitation.

Beyond that, I've always considered some of what I do to be art.

But in a world where we're facing some very big problems, am I actually contributing to society as an artist?

Or is that just an inherently selfish endeavor?

Doctors?

Well, now they can help.

We're in the midst of a pandemic.

Scientists?

They can help!

We're facing a global climate crisis.

Politicians?

They, too, can help.

They just often choose not to.

Artists?

I need to know what art is so I can know whether or not what I do actually matters.

And here in the information age, we are all deeply saturated in art.

Art has never been easier to access in all of human history.

And anything that plays that large of a role in your life is worth getting to know a little better.

So what about art, what truth do I hope to give definition to?

What really interests me about art is why it's such a resilient feature of culture and humanity.

I want to give words to our interactions with art so that we can better inspect why we value it so deeply.

Without resorting to mystical hyperbole.

So now that "what is" is out of the way, we may finally approach the matter of art.

Oh, I know!

We already have these really big categories of art called forms, and maybe if we group a bunch of them together, we can get a more clear idea of art as a whole.

Some cultures have utilized this sort of form-first approach, and I think it's sneakily crept into a lot of people's minds today.

So maybe there's some merit to it.

Like an ancient China, the Zhou dynasty emphasized six arts.

But we have to have a way more arts than that by now, right?

I mean, it's been two and a half thousand years.

And the meaning of art has almost certainly drifted quite a bit over all that time.

So it's hardly a fair comparison.

Hmm.

You know, maybe the aestheticians were onto something.

In the 1800s, plenty of folks were thinking about the meaning of art, so we saw the rise of aesthetics, or art philosophy.

And they tried to answer questions just like this.

Oh, but wait.

They only landed on five major arts.

And now that I think about it, they had some pretty wacky ideas about art, too.

For instance, here's what Leveque had to say.

Beauty is something invisible behind nature ?a force or spirit revealing itself in ordered energy.

I don't know, man.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Maybe it made more sense in the 1800s.

These kinds of listed definitions are called extensional definitions, and they're basically where the term you're defining is treated as a category and the definition is just a list of every component that belongs to that category.

As you can imagine, extensional definitions can get really out of hand, very fast.

Not a problem if you're defining something limited, like planets in our solar system.

But let's say you wanted to define humanity.

You would have to list literally every human who has ever lived or will ever live.

Which when you consider the blurry lines of evolution, once you go back enough generations, at some point that's going to be really hard to do.

Which person doesn't make the list because they can no longer technically be considered a human?

Then by the time that you get the back catalog filled out, you would need to go and add every human who has been born since you started making the list, and you would need to keep adding them.

But because you couldn't add every person who hasn't been born yet, you would always have an incomplete definition.

At least...

as long as humans continue to live.

In our case, even if you ignore individual works of art and you just focus on art forms themselves, we're still going to run into problems with this kind of definition.

Art forms are the result of technological innovation.

Photography didn't become an art form until the photograph was invented, and datamoshing didn't become an art form until video compression algorithms were invented and then broken in creative ways.

So it would be naive to think that new art forms won't continue to be introduced and if our definition doesn't inherently include them as well, then it simply won't do.

Okay.

So our definition shouldn't be just a list of forms.

But maybe we can still learn something from forms if we can find some commonality among them, Let's start nice and simple and work our way up.

Oh tight, a deus ex machina!

That's totally an art thing.

This is music.

I love that!

Whether or not this particular music can be considered good art I'm sure is debatable, but I think most people would at least have to concede that they consider most music to be classified as art.

Just maybe not all good art.

I now present exhibit B.

Was this art?

Well, I wasn't playing music.

Or was I?

No, don't.

Don't do that.

Counterintuitively, I was actually.

I just performed a brief excerpt from John Cage's composition "4 Minutes and 33 Seconds." The work of art commonly remembered as four and a half minutes of silence.

It's actually a really clever work of art that not only is not silent, but it dynamically changes every time it's performed.

The piece cleverly reframes music from being traditional performances on traditional instruments to literally all of the other diegetic sounds that happen during a performance.

So suddenly you're hearing an orchestra of ordinary sounds.

In a twist of fate, the audience becomes a performer and their instruments are their bodies shifting in the seats.

Chimes ring out in the distance, giving the piece melodic complexity.

Leaves rustle in the wind, building atmospheric texture.

Then factor in geese flying overhead, the shrill hum of an air conditioner, a cacophony of cars on a nearby road, a sprawling network of bug communication and the person on stage breathing.

It all becomes the focus.

It's unpredictable, unique, and inaccessible, despite every element being necessarily very commonplace.

Most of all, it doesn't have all of these trappings that we most typically associate with music.

Some might even go as far as to calling it anti-art.

Anti-art is a concept that, whether intentional or not, test the boundaries of what is considered to be art.

It is a collection of exceptions, and they're often met with mixed responses.

You find yourself in New York, a bustling hub of creatives.

War is weighing heavily on the mind because just one week ago, America entered World War One.

You're attending the first exhibit put on by the Society of Independent Artists.

It's a very exciting distraction.

The exhibit is almost two miles long and is filled with 2500 works from all sorts of people.

The ethos is simple: no jury, no prizes.

Send a submission and 6 dollars, you get a place in the exhibit and you're on even ground with everyone else.

So that's exactly what you do.

And once you're there, you're ecstatic to overhear a small crowd of people shuffling around one particular pedestal, trading back and forth the merits of this particular object's status as art.

What a thrill!

They may very well come closer to the truth of art.

At least they might have had Marcel Duchamp's art piece "Fountain" been allowed to stay on display for the event.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, two days before the opening, a much more dire and heated version of that conversation was taking place as staff prepared Fountain to go on the floor.

One of the directors of the exhibit was absolutely beside himself at the sight of Fountain .

He was disgusted and demanded that it be removed.

It was indecent.

Gross and offensive.

He protested.

The following day, a vote was held by some of the board of directors, which Duchamp was a part of, by the way.

This debate raged until just a few hours before the opening.

Ultimately, Fountain was removed.

Of course, this removal was in direct contradiction to the "no jury" bylaw.

Not a great start for their big first event.

Their statement was, " Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, "but its place is not an art exhibition, "and it is by no definition, "a work of art." What could have evoked such a reaction?

Well, Duchamp had bought a urinal, turned it on its side, signed it under a pseudonym, and submitted it in secret.

About a month later, a photograph of the piece was printed in the second issue of the magazine, The Blind Man.

Accompanying the photo was an editorial briefly outlining why it was disallowed in the exhibit and provided a rebuttal that defended its status as art.

This inspired discussion for a couple of years, but it went largely forgotten until the middle of the 20th century with a new wave of art movements.

So was it a sculpture?

Well, Duchamp considered it to be, but not everybody agrees.

Somebody designed and manufactured it, yes.

But Duchamp just bought it.

There's an element of curating materials, but is that enough?

Does the signed name classify it as a painting or perhaps graffiti?

Well, that kind of misses the point.

You could say it's a Dada work of art, but that's a movement, not a form.

So it ends up falling under readymades and found objects, which became an art form...

because of Duchamp's work.

Art forms are these categories with hazy boundaries that act elastic when art is close enough to be comfortably familiar.

But when the art is strange and different, the category splinters and envelops the outlying art to create an entirely new form, the creative process is sloppy and diverse, which lends itself really well to these exceptions.

So to find a truer boundary to art, I think we'll need to look elsewhere.

Okay, now bear with me, because now I think I've got it.

I feel like such an outright fool for not having thought of it sooner.

Admittedly, thinking about forms was the totally wrong approach.

Instead, we should be thinking about the masterworks of the ancients.

Those are indisputably art!

I'm talking Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Monet, Mozart, Michelangelo, Picasso, Chopin.

We all know their names and the works of art that they created.

These are the revered masters of their craft, whose works have withstood the test of time with centuries worth of legacy behind them.

Surely there must be something about these works and these celebrated artists that can guide us beyond the veil of the ever-elusive art.

Let's start with?

Eugh!

Ugh, sorry.

I hate it when that happens.

Gross.

It sounds good in theory, but unfortunately it's not going to work.

Let me briefly explain why.

Art is subject to the whims of curating forces, and that's nothing new.

These are the factors that influence the landscape of art and to some degree, can manufacture their legacies.

Tolstoy points to monarchs, religious rulers, and generally the wealthy upper class who leverage their power to preserve and almost deify the art that reinforce their own power dynamics.

If your entire way of life is built off of the backs of the lower class or maybe your religious following, are you going to really risk empowering them by commissioning art that has any chance of vilifying you and undermining your authority?

Probably not.

And depending on the time period we're talking about, you might end up being one of the few people who actually have the resources to preserve art.

So you get these little insulated pockets of art that have inherited their significance by sheer attrition.

If nothing else gets commissioned nothing else can be preserved.

Now, don't get me wrong.

I don't want to give off the impression that that these particular artists weren't skilled or didn't create art.

But I think it's important to consider that the art that survived might be limited in scope and function.

These forces of curation still exist, and wealth hasn't stopped tipping the scales.

Money buys advertising and priority placement in discoverability algorithms of various platforms.

Both of which can factor heavily in which art lives and which art dies in the modern era.

All I'm really trying to say is that we should be wary of survivorship bias.

We can't let ourselves fall into the trap of believing that the art that did survive, did so because it was great and most typified art.

And by association, mistakenly believing that the art that didn't survive couldn't have also shared both of those traits.

Let's also take a second to consider that everybody, all of these celebrated artists who I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, well...

they uh were all white men.

So this might have been a flawed data set to begin with.

You know, maybe we've been thinking too big with all this talk of art forms and art canon.

After all, we started the question by breaking it down into smaller pieces.

What if we tried to expose the atomic nature of art?

So to speak, just the smallest, most basic components.

If we're successful, then maybe we can extrapolate the larger structures that necessarily arise out of them.

So this is where a lot of the theory from aestheticians came into play and people started relying on the concept of beauty.

Beauty has gone through many different definitions and interpretations that vary by time and region.

But on average, it really just means something that's pleasurable to experience.

So there are a bunch of permutations of people looking at art as something that was made by a person, but it had to make you feel good.

Tolstoy strikes one last time with a good comparison that I think helps dispel this maybe silly prerequisite.

He argues that if you apply the same mentality to food and you define food as something that not only do you consume, but it has to bring you pleasure, then a whole lot of food is going to fall outside of that boundary condition.

Certainly pleasure can be a part of the experience of eating some foods, but it misses the point of food entirely.

Food is what we consume for nourishment and energy conversion.

It's kind of what keeps us alive.

We just happen to evolve over time to really enjoy some of it.

So similarly, Tolstoy argues that beauty is a false premise for art.

Now I'm not going to spend much more time on beauty because I personally find that it bears little basis on the purpose and function of art and is generally unhelpful.

I do still appreciate the intent to use beauty to build up art from smaller components, though.

But we've come a long way since the days of Tolstoy and the aestheticians who came before him.

Philosophy just might no longer be the right approach for this question.

And I think I know how we can get to the bottom of this in a truly sensible way.

Are you seeing this?

Wow, that is...

something!

I mean, it's unassailable.

It's...

It's art.

It's what we've been looking for!

It's so elegant.

It's like an NFT, but you know, real.

That's not what those are.

Gods, I don't even know where to begin.

You're pretentious, and this is just lazy.

I mean, whatever it is, it's certainly not art.

It's a damn hammer in a bottle.

>> No, no, no, no, no, no.

Okay.

Okay, look.

I hear you.

But!

It's Warholian in a way.

But it's playing off of that phrase, that idiom where?

>> Oh!

Where If you hammer a problem If the only tool you have is a hammer you're tough as nails.

you see every problem as a nail.

Right, yeah.

But this contextualizes the idiom by making it about unhealthy sugary drinks.

Because it's corn syrup.

Or it's about consumerism!

Or that thing where all of our recycling just gets thrown in the trash anyway and now our ocean's flooded with microplastics.

Or?

So this is the crux of our problem, right?

The same object is being observed by two observers.

It has merit for one, but not for the other.

So who is right and why?

Well, to find the answer to this we must trace the path of art's physical framework.

A thing here exists, and there are observers to notice it.

We've been calling the thing a work of art, but really, it's just something that can be perceived just like anything else.

Meanwhile, 93 million miles away, light is being radiated out from the Sun.

From our perspective, it seems like the photons took an unnervingly quiet, eight minute journey, crossing an indomitable expanse of space.

From their perspective, however, thanks to relativity, they seem to hit the bottle in an instantaneous moment.

The light slams into the bottle at tremendous speeds and can do a few things depending on the material properties of the bottle.

It passes through transparent materials in a process called transmission.

For opaque materials, some frequencies of light get absorbed.

The bottle basks in the warmth of that golden sunlight, in turn, radiating that same light in infrared.

All the rest of the light is reflected and some small portion of that, pass through the gateway to perception: our eyes.

That light then gets refracted through your cornea, which is the clear coating on the front of your eye.

And it goes in through the pupil, which is the big hole, and into a packet of transparent gel, which is the lens of your eye.

Now, this lens is surrounded by muscles that squeeze and stretch it out into different shapes, allowing you to focus at different distances.

And finally, we reach the end of the light's journey as it gets projected as a flipped image against the retina or the back wall of the eye.

Here lives a bunch of cells called cones and rods.

Maybe you've heard of them.

They're named loosely after their shape and they're photoreceptive.

So in the presence of light, they react and send signals to the brain.

Along this projected area is a spot called your fovea, which corresponds to the dead center of what your eye is pointed at.

This is effectively the spotlight for your vision.

Everything else is useful context, but doesn't quite get you the same fidelity of information.

The thing is, this foveal area is about the size of a pinhead and is made of up to 50,000 cones.

Of your entire visual range, it only covers a meager two degrees.

That's about the equivalent of an inch being held out at arm's length.

Consider the implications of this.

There are precious few things you see the entirety of in an instant with full clarity.

Instead, early in the process of seeing something, your brain recognizes that you're looking at part of an object so you anchor your sight onto different features that you prioritize without even thinking about it.

In effect, if it's detailed enough or important enough, your brain decides to scan it for more information.

The way that your brain handles this information is, let's say, complicated.

Your brain and your eyes for that matter, are the result of millions of years of biological evolution, which is a really slow and uneven process.

I bring this up to remind you that intelligence, cognition, and perception are all emergent features that arose from several complicated systems working together in unexpected ways.

With that in mind, my understanding is that the visual data gets sent to the back of the brain where the visual cortex is located, and it starts assessing the basic features of that data.

Your brain quickly works to figure out what it is you're looking at and where it is.

It engages in a data parsing operation by activating different areas of the brain that specialize in various tasks.

This is parallel processing, where a bunch of different things get worked on at the same time.

Eventually, you call for associations from your long term memory, and from that new associations can be made and the meaning of this object surfaces.

From a sprawling electrical storm throughout the brain, branches of neural activity finally strike ground.

You looked at a thing and had a thought.

In a way, your brain had to rebuild the work of art as an internal concept before you could make sense of it.

Both observers shared this autonomous process and observed the same object.

Yet came to vastly different conclusions.

And so far, this sounds like the process of looking at anything, distinctly not-art included.

This is where schemas intervene.

A schema, or if it's plural, ske-mata, ske-mutah, I will be calling it schemas, is the structure of a brain that allows incoming information to be meaningfully organized.

You can think of a schema as a mode that your brain operates in for a specific type of situation that you might experience.

Remember that observations are a tremendous amount of unparsed data, so schemas are like a collection of expectations that allow you to efficiently filter, process, and make sense out of your observations.

You also don't just have one.

You have many different schemas and sub-schemas.

It's pretty common to have many of them active at the same time, especially including broader schemas like your world view which is based on a unique lifetime of experiences.

So where in all of this discussion about the brain, are we supposed to find art?

Well, I don't know about you, but I can feel it all coming together.

We just have one piece of the puzzle that's missing: how we come to terms with information.

So you store a couple of different types of information in your brain for referencing later.

Specifically, I want to focus on exemplars and prototypes.

Let's say you look at an apple.

An exemplar is a memory of a specific instance of something, be it an object like our apple, or it could be a color, or shape, or whatever.

But it isn't efficient to store a bunch of information in your brain from every apple you've ever held or eaten.

After a certain point that becomes redundant.

A prototype, on the other hand, is a generalized concept of the apple.

It's the gestalt of appleness.

It's a set of boundary conditions that you apply to the idea of apple.

Based on amalgamated impressions from many different apples you've interacted with.

As you encounter more apples, you adjust these boundaries so that all apples fit into your prototype.

While it might not be useful to remember every individual apple, it is useful to know a good apple from a bad apple.

A variety of properties indicate this, including its size, its shape, color, taste, consistency, smell, texture, weight, and so on.

We incorporate exemplars and prototypes into our schemas so that in any given situation, we have some idea of what to expect from the world around us.

When we see an apple, we engage in our apple schema, and before we take a bite into it, we already have expectations for how it will nourish us.

We've mapped out the many signs of an apple's quality to guide our future interactions with them, and if something unexpected happens, we build that into our expectations going forward by making our schema more robust.

Now, what if I draw a rough illustration of an apple?

There, that is my rough illustration of an apple.

It's supposed to be rough and it is rough.

Now notice that you'll recognize a few characteristics traits that we have come to expect from apple.

This is my canonical representation, sort of an ideal form that I keep stored in my brain to quickly reference when I think of an apple.

It has, you know, roughly the general shape of most apples.

It has the one stem.

It has a little bit of freckling on the skin and that characteristic shine.

However, we are not fooled.

We do not believe that this is a real apple and we use many clues to help us understand that.

Numerous visual clues indicate to us that this particular apple is flat and not a three-dimensional object as we know that apples are.

There's a wide range of colors that apples tend to be, but this features none of those colors.

Now, there are some very small apple types, however, most apples are not to this scale.

These conflicts between what we've categorized the object as and what we've come to expect of that category are called dissonance.

Our brains really like to resolve dissonance when possible, and we have a few different ways of doing that.

We could outright dismiss it.

Maybe I was mistaken.

This is not an apple and it's not important that it appeared to be one.

I will simply reject this experience from my apple schema.

It's probably the simplest path forward for the brain.

There is another option, though.

We may rationalize this disparity by changing our understanding of the world around us to justify the difference.

We may view the paper as having some strange property we were previously unaware of.

When someone placed upon the paper's surface an apple, with all of its familiar properties it may have enveloped the apple through some forbidden alchemy and transformed it into this crude flat form.

Now, this is a pretty tough path to take, as it requires substantial revisions to numerous schemas.

That requires a lot of work and it has some pretty harsh consequences if our assumptions are incorrect.

It can seriously warp our understanding of the world, so we're generally reluctant to do that.

But then there is a third option.

We might resolve this conflict by treating it as symbolic representation.

It is certainly evocative of apple, but by not exactly matching our criteria for apple, it may be trying to express a more metaphorical meaning by calling upon our apple schema and allowing us to associate it with something else.

Art is not some cryptic message channeled through divine intervention, nor is art some glorious, mystical property bestowed upon the inanimate.

As far as I can tell, art is the act of a brain resolving dissonance in such a way that it not only informs the most immediate schema that of an apple, let's say, but in doing so infers such a deep and valuable insight that it cascades down into many different schemas, including broader and more fundamental structures like your worldview.

It exists solely as a process within your brain.

It is a uniquely deep insight that becomes a part of who you are, and helps you face the harsh indifference of the world.

It's a leveraging of your evolutionarily complex brain to push past the resistance of dismissal and along the way, learn a rich truth from something that didn't quite fit your expectations.

Now, this possible explanation feels like it's finally striking at the criteria we set out to find.

I do have a small note on usage, though.

This definition of art as an internal process doesn't really line up with how most people tend to use the term art in conversation.

But we can resolve this pretty simply by considering the common usage to be a rhetorical device called metonymy.

For instance, I might say, "Hey, pour me some re-wetted water into that glass over there." But it's understood that by saying "glass," what I really meant was a cup made out of glass.

In the same sense, when folks say art, what they might mean is a work of art and the internal process that results from it.

A piece of the whole becomes representative of the entire system.

Now, let's consider some implications of this definition.

Ideally, this will allow us to clarify some of art's hazy boundaries.

Is art strictly human?

Well, any time I approach a question with this particular line of thinking, my immediate reaction is to push back.

Are we made in a god's image?

Well, check out the ego on that question.

If we are, our creator is certainly not a humble one.

Are we in the center of the solar system?

No.

Absolutely not.

How about the galaxy?

Also, again no.

How about the universe?

Okay.

Well, that's a different discussion.

We give so much value to art that it feels incredibly egocentric to imagine that no other creatures are even capable of making works of art or even feeling art.

And if we're isolating this view of art as something that the brain does well, brains are complicated.

And as I mentioned before, the result of millions of years of really fortuitous evolutionary paths.

It's not that our brains are any better.

It's just different in some ways.

And unless other creatures have the same interworking systems and can process information in the same way as we do, it seems like we might be alone on this one.

I've had a hard time finding any definitive studies on animals' relationship with art.

Maybe you've seen a video of an elephant painting, but there is a study suggesting they don't feel any better for doing it.

There's a study on birds preferences for various paintings, but that doesn't exactly mean that they feel art.

Maybe you see in animals engaging in spontaneous synchronization.

Moving to music.

Is that enough to tell?

I don't know.

Unfortunately, the fact remains that there is a tremendous gap in shared language, culture, and basic perceptive experience that prevents us from being certain.

Growing up, I had this view of consciousness as a binary trait of a living being.

Is Commander Data sapient and as such, owed all of the rights of any sapient being?

Or as an android, does he somehow fall under that hard-to-define threshold?

But there is theory that consciousness is not some trait of the brain that just gets switched on, but instead is a variety of complex systems within the brain working together to achieve an effect.

It's...

an emergent property.

It may be possible for a living being to have different degrees of consciousness and to utilize different degrees of awareness and to live and learn in those capacities.

Since consciousness developed with the evolution of the brain and art is a product of the brain, maybe it stands to reason that some nonhuman creatures can evoke some of the feeling of art.

They may also be able to benefit from observing something unexpected, but maybe it doesn't change their worldview if they even have one.

It depends on their brain specifically, and what inspires that insight for them.

Can art change?

Well, there's a genre of art called ephemeral art, and its entire purpose is to call attention to its own changing nature.

So, sure, yeah, art can change by design, but maybe a better question is can art deviate from its artist's intent?

Art preservation exists, at least in part, to repel the necessary divergence from intent into decay.

A painting or sculpture or whatever else is always at risk of simply deteriorating.

Exposure to light, humidity, temperature, pollutants, bugs, dust, all of these things can damage the work of art.

And once it's too far gone, it'll no longer be recognized as a work of art.

But change isn't just deleterious and perception and takes many paths beyond our control.

So with our theory in mind, I would be remiss not to recount the glorification of the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa is arguably the world's most well-known painting at this moment in time.

And with that familiarity comes a certain level of reverence.

But it wasn't always that way.

It was rather unremarkable as far as paintings hung in the Louvre can be.

Louvre.

But that all changed in 1911 when it was stolen by a man named Vincenzo Perugia.

The heist was a low key affair, you know, hiding in a closet and walking out with it awkwardly hidden under your coat kind of situation.

He was met with effectively no resistance, at least until circumstances conspired against him as the media picked up the story and suddenly newspapers on the other side of the world were captivated by the mystery of who stole the Mona Lisa.

His prize for Italy suddenly became very hot and the target of some very bright spotlights.

So he nervously stowed it away in his apartment for the next two years.

By the end of 1913, he tried to pawn it off to an art exhibit owner who immediately turned him into the police.

But by then, the Mona Lisa had already become a global sensation.

And I get the impression that the relief and uplifting feeling of finding that painting in such good condition after all of that time, right before a...

particularly big turning point in history helped cement it into the cultural bedrock of society.

Its perilous journey became integrated into the schemas of just about everybody at the time.

And that fundamentally changed how everybody thought about the painting.

It was no longer just about the subject or the technique of brushstrokes.

The observer's Mona Lisa schema could be primed with this perilous history of the canvas.

Now, their insight might be derived not from what appears on the canvas, but from what they project onto it.

They might inject themselves into the meta-narrative of the painting, saying, "how fortunate we are to stand witness "to the very same artifact that went through such an ordeal.

"We are now part of its story, "and it's part of ours." Surely, this was never Leonardo da Vinci's intention in the early 1500s.

So much time has passed now that while the story of its two-year vacation is still remembered, it's probably just better known for being well-known.

And that also colors viewings of the painting.

It's still celebrated and extremely popular.

But given more time how will the context for that painting drift and fade?

Will it be deified or disregarded?

I think it's kind of exciting that we don't really know because that fate gets written in every passing moment and could change in the next.

>> JASON: But up there you go around every hour and a half; time after time after time.

And you wake up usually in the mornings, and just the way the track of your orbits go you wake up over the Mid-East, and over North Africa.

And as you eat breakfast, you look out the window as you're going past and there's the Mediterranean area, Greece, and Rome, and North Africa, and the Sinai, that whole area.

And you realize that in one glance, what you're seeing is what was the whole history of man for years ?

the cradle of civilization.

And you think of all that history that you can imagine, and you go down across North Africa and out over the Indian Ocean and you look up at that great subcontinent of India pointed down toward you as you go past it, Ceylon off to the side, and Burma, Southeast Asia, out over the Philippines and up across that monstrous Pacific Ocean, that vast body of water.

You've never realized how big that is before.

And you finally come up across the coast of California and you look for those friendly things, Los Angeles, and Phoenix and on across to El Paso.

And there's Houston, there's home.

You know, and you look and sure enough, there's the Astrodome ?

and you identify with that.

It's an attachment.

And on across New Orleans and then you look down to the south and there's the whole peninsula of Florida just laid out.

And all the hundreds of hours you've spent flying across that route down in the atmosphere, all that is friendly again.

You go out across the Atlantic Ocean and back across Africa, you do it again and again and again.

And you identify with Houston, and then you identify with Los Angeles, Phoenix, and New Orleans.

And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you're identifying with North Africa.

You look forward to that, you anticipate it, and there it is.

That whole process begins to shift of what it is you identify with.

When you go around it in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing.

And that makes a change.

And you look down there, and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross.

Again and again and again, and you don't even see them.

There you are ?

hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that you can't see.

And from where you see it, this thing is a whole and it's so beautiful.

You wish you could take one in each hand, one from each side and say, "Look.

Look at it from this perspective, look at that.

"What's important?" And a little later on, your friend, the person next to you goes out to the Moon.

And now he looks back and he sees the Earth not as something big, where he can see the beautiful details, but now he sees the Earth as a a small thing out there.

Now that contrast between the bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament and that black sky, that...

infinite universe, it really comes through.

And the size of it, the significance of it ?

it becomes both things.

It becomes so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block out with your thumb.

And you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you.

All of history, music, poetry, art, war and death and birth, love, tears, joy, games, all of it!

And that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb.

And you realize from that perspective that you've changed that there's something new there and that the relationship is it's no longer what it was.

And it tells you something about your relationship with this thing we call life.

So that's a change that's ?

that's something new.

When you come back, there's a difference in that world now, there's a difference in that relationship between you and that planet.

And you and all those other forms of life on that planet because you've had that kind of experience.

It's a difference and it's so precious.

>> BRANDT: That was a lecture given by astronaut Russell Schweickart in 1974, where he described the first time publicly, his experiences being in outer space during the Apollo nine mission in 1969.

He was describing what's come to be known as the overview effect, and it's something that more than a few astronauts have reported experiencing.

Now, to me, this sounds like the effects of a most potent art.

What every work of art should really aspire to do.

He had a literal change in worldview.

He was up there, and by every measure that I can imagine, he felt it.

But there was no artist who painted this canvas.

No, this was the result of billions of years of change and a whole lot of good luck.

It didn't need to be abstracted by the inability to perfectly represent something that we're already familiar with.

Instead, it was creatively abstracted through perception itself.

Earth became symbolic of life and art was felt nonetheless.

Even though our senses are our only means of accessing information from the world around us, the natural world has no obligation to strictly operate within them.

When you see something, you're limited to the spectrum of light visible to humans.

You see relative color and can fall victim to illusions because of that.

And pressure is such a diverse set of information that we have two full senses dedicated to it: touch and hearing.

Your ears are just calibrated for frequency of pressure, while touch is calibrated for persistent force.

We are rife with human limitations on sensing the world around us as it actually exists.

I imagine this probably provides many windows of opportunity for us to observe the unexpected.

It almost seems as though the artist has been abandoned in all of this.

As you've already established, we don't even need them for art to exist.

And it's true, artists have far less power in the determination of art than I expected when I initially set out to answer this question.

But I assure you, the artist still has value.

Look, not everybody can just go to outer space, at least not yet.

And of everybody who does, there's no guarantee that they'll even experience the overview effect.

Some of them are just sick the entire time.

So unrelentingly sick, in fact, that they informally have a scale of space sickness named after them.

What an artist really does is provide opportunities for all of us to be able to create these shifts in perspective.

Without the artist, art would only be inspired by the world's outliers, which are rare by their very nature.

The art movement is effectively a combined effort to manufacture exceptions, making the process and feeling of art more accessible.

We might all, as conscious, thinking human beings, denounce the movie Paul Blart as being fully incapable of evoking the feeling of art, some small percentage of lost, confused souls will feel art from it, and I cannot invalidate that.

They felt it, and gods know I cannot reach them.

This video will strike them with but a dull thud.

But the only way we move forward is if everybody has the opportunity, no matter what shape it takes, to expand what they think is possible in this world.

The role of the artist exists to maximize your odds of developing an insight and to offer some guidance on which particular insights you might realize.

They build a framework so you can safely challenge your assumptions.

But there's a balance to be found in an artist's guidance.

Let's say a new movie comes out explicitly belaboring the many ways in which prisons detriment society.

The audience may fundamentally disagree with the premise that prisons can cause harm, so they may simply dismiss any dissonance that they find.

Maybe the movie was too heavy-handed or even manipulative by telling us what to think about prisons.

The breadth of interpretation and has been severely curtailed as the artist tries to resolve the dissonance for the audience.

Going too far in the opposite direction can cause issues as well.

If an artist makes something particularly abstract, there's less guidance, and that comes with the risk of skewing interpretations chaotically.

Now, this isn't necessary surely a bad thing, but it does require more work for an observer to realize a deep insight.

Theoretically, you could realize this insight just by looking at a rock.

Maybe you had prisons on the mind and you caught the rock at just the right angle.

Of course, no one person should be expected to have such a rare and incidental insight.

Then maybe you have a movie that makes prison the subject of a metaphor.

You subvert deeply entrenched ideas the audience might already have about prisons by presenting its most egregious problems in a totally new context.

This way, the observer inherits a framework that actually challenges the problem but it also grants them the latitude and agency to navigate the problem on their own terms.

Artists take on a great responsibility They do their most societal good by thinking critically about the world around them, paying attention to the problems that we face, and incorporating into their work a sensibility indicative of there being a better way.

Through that work, they may inspire many different perspectives to at least agree that something doesn't match with our expectations of how things should be.

Even at their least effective, artists explore well-trodden territories and evoke redundant insight, but they can still reach someone.

Nobody has been exposed to every possible perspective, every exemplar, every worldview, every insight.

This may also explain why art seems so much more potent when you're young.

It's not that art was any better in the past.

It's just that your schemas were so much less developed by experience.

So it was easier to access deeper insights and inform more schemas, thereby feeling more art I find good and bad to be really unhelpful labels for art, or really anything for that matter.

They're just so damn ambiguous and reductive.

I think a good communication goal is to find clarity behind that emotional gut reaction.

So let's do exactly that.

People do use these labels.

I'm even guilty of using them earlier in this video.

So how can we reframe these terms to better understand what people intend to say?

Well, I've come to think of this quality, the goodness of art to represent its effectiveness.

To be more precise, I'm not referring to the number of people upon which a work had or is likely to have an effect upon.

That is its accessibility.

No.

Instead, I'm referring to the effectiveness within the individual who use the term.

The goodness of art is the result of some mixture of how many schemas were informed, which ones were informed, and how much they were informed.

There's probably some balance to be found between the breadth and depth of change within this vast network of schemas.

So in other words, the more we are changed by a work of art, the more highly we might regard it.

We feel more connected to it because within it we see the potential to change someone from who we were to who we've become.

Ultimately, that progression and ability to grow is what we value.

We bestow so much power upon art because it grants us access to this.

I suspect this is why we can be so crestfallen when the people we love don't in turn love the art that helped shape us.

We identify with the art and sometimes the artists who made it because we see our own change within them.

So we associate the condemnation of the work of art with a rejection of that part of us.

Even though this way of thinking totally ignores the intractably personal and singular relationship we develop with art.

Nobody will experience art the same way as you, not even yourself at a later date.

Now, while we're on the topic of semantics, I guess a little more than the whole video already is now feels like a good time to advocate for the end of what I've come to call honorary art.

Say we go to a poetry reading, which generally doesn't resonate much with me.

I may still feel a compulsion out of respect for an artist's effort to call their work art, even if it never inspired the feeling of art within me.

I suspect this is an extension of certain egalitarian sensibilities, particularly that I cannot single-handedly revoke a work's status as art.

I'm trying to graciously offer the recognition of art despite my own inability to connect with it.

I know it has to be there.

I just didn't feel it.

But there's a sneaky problem with this line of thought.

First of all, this assumes that something can possibly not be capable of inspiring art.

But as we've already established that potential is inherent to everything at all times.

Everything is a work of art, but calling something a work of art just reframes it as something that we can learn from.

More critically, however, when we truly respect art, as we experience it within ourselves, it becomes more equitable by granting to others that same irrevocable personal validity.

You and I may both look upon a hammer in a bottle, and it is allowed to both inspire art and not inspire art simultaneously.

I cannot invalidate your experience, nor can you invalidate mine.

But if I allow myself to label something as art, when the feeling is absent, I will have begun using a different criteria for the term.

This new criteria is no longer exclusive to the domain of my personal experience.

Art is now about the trappings of form, the presentation, the artistic intent.

It becomes a theatrical label of status, and it regresses back to that mystical and ill-defined nature.

So I really think that it's in the best interests of everyone if we respect our own experiences and give others that same latitude.

Quite simply, if it feels like art, call it art.

Otherwise, don't.

So was the unseen painting art?

Well, everybody seems to carve out different distinctions to try to answer that question.

Even when folks agree, it's pretty common that they will have different reasons for why they agree.

But now we have a shared definition to help us answer questions just like this.

You might have initially thought that all creation is inherently art.

Well, I certainly concede that creation is necessary for art to exist, and observer must be created to feel art, and something must be created to inspire that feeling within them.

Whether that is created by another person or a less-agent force like the universe.

But creation alone does not satisfy our criteria.

Instead, maybe you assumed that all paintings are art.

Then you were validated by the logic that its destruction does not revoke it from having been art.

Well, it was a painting that was never in dispute, but forms alone do not satisfy our criteria.

You might have likened the painting to a work of art created by somebody who was visually impaired or blind, judging strictly by its means of creation the similarities are hard to deny.

But there's a crucial distinction here.

A blind painter can touch their painting, sensing its texture and shape.

A sighted observer can see their painting or also touch it.

However, at no point did anybody observe this painting.

So in this case, I felt effectively nothing as I painted maybe a little bit of resistance in the brushstrokes.

But I can assure you it was a mentally numb sensation.

I should also stipulate that I have aphantasia the inability to mentally visualize.

So while I was painting, I couldn't even visually imagine whatever it was that I was doing.

The unseen painting remained unseen, unfelt, unknown.

Its shape and movement and texture and discovered coincidences all remain undocumented losses.

The painting may have been capable of evoking the feeling of art, it just never got a chance to.

The complex processing of connections and associations remained quiet.

That elusive neural interaction never lit up.

We are discussing the painting, though.

In a way we're kind of observing the concept of the painting.

So can we grant that painting arthood associatively?

Well, no.

This discussion is its own distinct work.

But boundaries can be drawn to salvage some elements of the unseen painting.

My performance of painting blindfolded could be considered art by the few folks who were kind enough to help me record this video.

They did observe that, and of course, the recording of my performance of painting blindfolded well, you observe that.

So that could be considered art.

I must admit, my views on the nature of art have shifted in various directions over the years.

I thought I had an idea for what art was when I started this video over a year ago, but I landed somewhere else entirely.

It's actually quite beautiful that it so closely reflects some of the core ideas of Emergent Beacon.

That we pursue these sort of conflicts, these things that don't make sense to us.

And on the other side of it, we get this feeling of discovery, this clarity of knowledge.

Having settled on this framework, I suddenly realized just how much discussion of art is normally dominated by the idea of the divinity and brilliance of the artist.

Art is so often depicted as a fantasy of one individual's power that you too could create something praised 400 years from now, that you may glimpse your god, that you may pioneer some crevice of the human condition never before given words.

But that lure for the ego misses so much of what art is.

It's such a shame, because I think it would be so much more empowering to see art as this ingenious technique we've all inherited to leverage our brain to learn about everything from something that doesn't make sense.

Art is a part of all of us and in some ways, it's a measure of who we've become.

When it's all said and done, we'll find ourselves sitting in the shadow of cataclysm and all that we will be left with is the clarity of what art has instilled within us.

As always, my sources are listed in the description and in more detail on the website.

If you have any corrections, please feel free to leave a comment below.

And most of all, thank you for enduring this very long video.

It's taken me a year to research, write, film, edit, do the whole thing.

It has been a tremendous effort and it's easily the most ambitious video I've tried to make.

If you enjoyed this, then please consider supporting me at patreon.com/emergentbeacon.

If we had certain milestones, I'll be able to make these videos much, much faster.

I'm talking two to three, maybe even four times faster.

So that would be nice.

But if you can't, I understand.

You can still join the Discord for free over at discord.emergentbeacon.com and uh yeah, we talk about programing and science and video production, stuff like?

natural disasters, stuff like that.

As I leave you with your thoughts, I'd ask you to maybe sometime soon go look at the moon.

Like, really look at it.

Think about the history of what it's gone through and think about all of the other people who have also looked at the moon.

It's really great tool for finding a little humility and making yourself feel just a little smaller.

Thank you for your time.

It's really cold out here, by the way.