When it comes to art (considered broadly, so as to include literature and various kinds of performance, not to mention a good bottle of wine) I am a radical subjectivist. If you like it, great; if you don’t, that’s your prerogative. There is no such thing as being “right” or “wrong” in one’s opinion about a work of art; what’s important is the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it.
Nevertheless, there’s no question that one’s attitude toward a work of art can be radically changed by outside information or experiences. You might come to understand it better, or conversely you might be overexposed to it and just get bored.
Scientists, in particular, love it when they discover that some boring old art thing that they had previously perceived as undifferentiated and uninteresting actually possesses some hidden structure. If you were ever caught in the unfortunate situation of teaching an art- or film-appreciation class to scientists, the right strategy would be to reveal, insofar as possible, the underlying theories by which the work in question is constructed. And if you think there are no such theories, you’re just not looking hard enough.
Recent examples, which I would blog about in extraordinary depth and breathtaking insight (with a dash of self-deprecating humor) if I were a professional blogger rather than a scientist with a blogging hobby:
- Patrick House in Slate reveals the algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Involves concepts such as the “theory of mind” joke. (Via 3QD.) As far as I know, there is not yet an algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.
- The Science of Scriptwriting! This one actually appeared on the arxiv, under the more formal title “The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts.” (Via Swans on Tea and the physics arxiv blog.)
- Relatedly, back in March Jennifer was serving as the Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, and ran a series of Friday workshops. One of them was Inside the Writer’s Room: Where Physics and Hollywood Collide, featuring guest speakers David Saltzberg and David Grae. David #1 is a physicist at UCLA and also the science consultant for the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which I will write about someday, I promise. David #2 is a TV scriptwriter, who was there to tell the physicists how to write for TV. About which maybe also more, someday, but right now I just wanted to highlight one phenomenon: when David was talking about possible plot lines and characters, the physicists played along and seemed mildly interested. But when he revealed that an hour-long TV drama is inevitably broken up into specific acts, each of which generally (in the case of each show) has a particular function within the larger narrative, the room lit up. There was a theory of TV dramas! More than one person said they would never be able to watch prime-time television in quite the same way again.
Also, of course, the assembled physicists all had a similar question: “Why don’t they make a TV show about me, or someone like me? Those people are all nerds!” I have a theory about that.
As far as I know, there is not yet an algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.
Hint: I accept PayPal.
I think many scientists do appreciate the (relative) lack of underlying fully-encompassing theories of art. not everything is, or needs to be, scientific to be worth appreciating. some personal definitions:
Science answers questions that we want answered.
Art is what doesn’t answer questions that we don’t want answered.
Reminds me of how excited I was when I read about this research into the fractal nature of Jackson Pollock’s art.
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
— Paul Dirac
@Melina–
i was also blown away by the implications of richard taylor’s fractal analysis of pollock. then, i read this, and was quite a bit disappointed.
Hi Sean,
Fairly long time reader, but very rare with commenting… Great topic. I would probably also add that art has a great ability to inspire and motivate. I am very certain that seeing 2001 as a kid planted the seed which later grew into the motivation to go into physics (in spite of having no clue as to what the movie was about when I saw it…I was pretty young at the time). To this day, I can not hear a Strauss waltz without having visions of space stations dance in my head and am reasonably certain this was not Strauss’ intent.
As to “The Big Bang Theory”, I look forward to your comments. I have come to more or less enjoy the show, due mainly to some of the physics in-jokes and comments. I thought the Doppler-effect Halloween costume was brilliant. Although all through my years in undergraduate and graduate school, everybody I knew was considerably more rounded than the caricatures depicted on the program, they still seem like people I could be comfortable hanging out with now and then. My wife, also a Ph.D. in physics, on the other hand, hates the show. She believes it displays physicists in a stereotypical bad light (which I can not totally disagree with) and that all through her physics career she never knew anybody like any of the characters. I think perhaps a plot twist could be in order, where the love interest, Penny, starts picking up an interest in physics..gets accepted at Caltech, etc. Not sure how one would write a sitcom script for that though..
Sean: “I have a theory about that.”
Which is?
(I can’t read your mind. Yet.) 😉
See this interview with mathematician and novelist Manil Suri.
Thank you for this post. When I was a child in Chicago, a great aunt took me on regular excursions to both the Field and the Museum of Science and Industry… they became almost a dream landscape for me. For years she sent me birthday subscriptions to the Scientific American… when they were less inclined to publish articles written for laymen to understand.
I was torn. I came from a family of artists… all of whom venerated science. I never understood the conventional ideas of an assumed war between science and the arts… nor between religion and art… but the latter, only because my primary understanding of “religion’ was basically aesthetic, and had little to do with anyone’s theology.
This last post touched my heart… on the one hand, it’s almost childlike (not childish) naivety… and on the other-you touch on, howsoever crudely, exactly the critical points that are most worth working through.
Look, I’m in awe of you science guys and gals… and of your effort to bring more gals into the fold. But though it’s way more difficult and uncertain a task to point out who’s gonna last–that is to say–be fertile to the next generation of writers and poets–nonetheless–we still have something, however difficult to define, in common.
Your almost touchingly naive post…nonetheless gets to the heart of how we talk about judgement in art and literature, what it’s possible to say, and what it’s not–if there is any hope of finding a common language:
a commitment to a kind of truth… or rather, different angles and viewpoints on that elusive target.
You are a brave man to cross the line and talk about what we may or may not have in common.
But then… that’s what I love about CosmicVariance!
Keep up the good work.. and for Fred’s sake, delete the Trolls without further apology !
Look at any scriptwriting textbook and you’ll find that it’s basically a mechanics textbook. Novelists are writers but scriptwriters are engineers. The vocabulary of our craft is peppered with physics and engineering metaphors. We talk about story structure, character arcs and dramatic tension. We think about internal and external forces acting upon a character. We try to give our plots momentum and our stories power. Some day at some physics conference, I want to do a talk on how to adapt Newton’s Laws of Motion to write a screenplay I’m convinced that I could turn all the scientists into dramatic writers.
Penny,
Script writing is prosaody. Versification… but with a more practical rationalization. It’s “how to” component. A script is also a blueprint. Not only, but also.
Mastery of versification in itself doesn’t get you beyond Halmark Mother’s Day cards.
“Structure,” goes way beyond versification… into what what was there before the Big Bang… theory built on residual evidence. Science and art are open ended, but in very different ways. Science is open ended, in that any given postulate is tentative, but tentative to an at least theoretical final conclusion. Art has no claim to any such theoretical goal. It’s all contingency.
Which does NOT mean: ‘it’s all subjective.’ There are always weaker and more robust interpretations and judgments… just that they have no theoretical endpoint.
Art is not amorphous emoting… it’s a form of thinking… how we think ourselves into being.
Art without awareness of science… is kitch. Science without awareness of art ?
You tell me.
Obviously what qualifies as art is subjective, in the mind of the beholder. But I think a necessary condition is that an artist creates their work as they see fit, with no primary motive or even thought to seek approval (or disapproval) of others.
Naturally, any artist hopes for recognition of what they are trying to convey. But working merely to anticipate the public’s tastes and preconceptions (even if to oppose them) is not art but artifice, however skillful or ingenious, and more like marketing!
Of course many artists work within parameters, such as the wishes of patrons or customers. If Michaelangelo had chosen to paint the Sistine chapel ceiling with a random collection zig-zag patterns, it would have been considered an abomination and rapidly painted over. All the same, if he had genuinely expressed some coherent internal vision it would qualify as art and had it been visible today tourists would marvel at his abstract art, produced so far ahead of its time!
Also, within parameters, there’s no reason why art should not overlap with science and maths. With these of course the parameters are stricter, including consistency and due credit for the work of others for example.
It could be argued that most art is meant to excite (or calm) emotions. But with poetry or literature for example these can be fairly intellectual. So arguably a science paper or book which reveals new meaning or interpretation is simply the same a bit further along the refinement scale.
In summary, if hidden patterns like fractal dots are in artwork becuse they are needed then fine. But if they’re present as a deliberate gimmick, with the intention of being a talking point once pointed out, then the artist is a joker at best and probably a fraud.
I think the first comment in the anti-caption contest nailed it.
re #13 for an *anti* caption contest, the “worst possible” caption?
Nah – far too pithy and apposite
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I’ve just discovered something amazing by chance last week, something that you can do on photoshop with a single image of a Whale! or any other image for that matter, this one just happens to be a Whale. http://quantumnonsense.blogspot.com/2008/06/eternity.html
I think I have just opened “A can of worms!” as they say, but dont worry too much; because only stupid people can see how amazings these pictures are!
Qubit,
That’s an amazing picture 😉
Claire
What wrong with you?
why did you delete my question?
What was wrong with that Question? It can’t have been the spam filter. Can you not tell me what that picture is? Do you know what it is?
I must be stupid me, to even think that something so simple can have a name, it must have? Its a natural image, it produces natural images, its ether the first time its ever been seen or you’ve seen it already. If you have seen it, then it has a name! If nobody has seen it before, then it is mine! And therefore belongs to me and I now own the copyright to it!
Qubit