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Jonah Lehrer spoke last Tuesday at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and tried to answer the question ‘what makes good art good art?’ and how the answer to that question may provide insight into the world of science.
The question itself is as old as ancient Greece and as essential as ‘what makes us human?’ or ‘why are we here?’ Lehrer takes a new look at the question using his background as a neuroscientist.
Lehrer, a Rhodes Scholar who attended Columbia and Oxford Universities, said that great art is great because it is particularly engaging to our mind.
“The larger question I’m trying to get at here is trying to see how art can benefit from asking these kinds of scientific questions…why is this Jackson Pollock, this paint dripped haphazardly on a canvas, why is that meaningful?, why is that worth a hundred million dollars?, why do we find that beautiful?, what can that teach us about the visual cortex?”
“The basic assumption behind asking these kinds of questions is that great art is not an accident, that it works for a reason, and that by reverse engineering the art, by trying to figure out why we still look and at Jackson Pollock or read Hamlet or whatever, you can learn something interesting about the brain.”
Lehrer uses music as an example. In particular Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” which caused a riot upon its first performance in France in 1913. The piece is known for it’s unpredictability, and outright rebellion against the rules of traditional music.
“There is a small circuit of cells in the auditory cortex called the cortical fugal network…these neurons do something very interesting…when you play these cells a new set of sounds…at first these cells get very confused they emit what’s called a prediction error signal, it’s their way of saying…‘we can’t find the pattern here’.”
But then when you play these same cells the same sound a few times, they learn to make sense of it, all of the sudden this thing which seemed so disturbing…now begins to make sense.”
“The Rite of Spring” is now a popular piece of music played throughout the world, and the soundtrack for part of Disney’s ‘Fantasia’.
Lehrer said newer artists like Kanye West and Girl Talk are using basically the ‘same bag of tricks’ as artists like Stravinsky and Beethoven. Both contemporary music artists use samples and repeat them in complex or unpredictable ways.
The concept is relatively easy to understand if you think about elevator music as opposed to a Beethoven symphony. Elevator music may be pleasant and unjarring, but you would probably never choose to listen to elevator music because it isn’t very interesting or engaging.
Lehrer also spoke about the art of food, by using the example of French chef Escoffier, who’s style of cooking is the basis for French cooking today.
“When Escoffier first started cooking like this…it was, simply put, the best thing anyone had ever tasted.”
At the time nobody knew why it tasted so good, until 1907 when a Japanese scientist named Kikunae Ikeda, who did research on food, realized there was a taste sensation that could not be accounted for with the traditional taste sensations: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
Ikeda discovered what made some food taste so good was a compound called Glutamate, which is in things like aged cheese, prosciutto, and foods like the ones Escoffier cooked.
People at the time didn’t believe him, or thought his findings were completely uninteresting for nearly 100 years. Recently, new studies of the tongue revealed a taste receptor specifically for glutamate. Now scientists believe it may be the most important taste receptor.
This particular example has obvious implications, that by paying attention to why art is so intriguing to us, we can learn something important about how our brain works. Lehrer believes not only that the two fields can teach each other things, but that one can cover areas of understanding the other can not.
“The one reality [neuroscience] can’t describe, the reality of this here-and-now subjective experience, is the only one we’ll ever know. That, I believe, is why we need art. I think artists are adept at describing experience in terms of experience, they describe the flux the feel, the texture of reality in a way that only great art can.”
November 27, 2008 at 9:52 am
You see in art, color, form, design if you will has rhythm. It is a language that artists are perhaps born with and develop as they experience the world. Everyone has this visual language comprised of shapes, lines, color and so on. When all of this comes together like in Pollacks painting it stimulates these senses sometimes in ones present mind and for others on a deeper level. I have often wondered whether this language is passed on to an artists off spring. Or if it is just learned by the children because of experience, exposure to art. But we all have a visual understanding just as we all hear music. We don’t all always like what we see or hear or perhaps understand what we are seeing or hearing. Touch also plays a role here and sculpture is a three dimensional language. Advertising depends on our senses of rhythm, color shape, form, preconceived beauty. They combine images with sound, music to stimulate the point of sale. Like food commercial on TV. Any way very interesting post.