{"id":72,"date":"2007-11-21T10:23:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-21T18:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=72"},"modified":"2007-11-21T10:23:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-21T18:23:00","slug":"the-end-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"The End of Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This whole stem-cell breakthrough<\/a> is certainly worth keeping track of, but not here because you know about it already; it’s all over other sites far more popular than mine. Ditto the hilarious perspective on WoW<\/a> which serves as the subject of today’s visual aid, starring characters which many of us must know (albeit in roles with more contemporary fashion sense). No, today I’m going to direct your attention to neuroeasthetics, and the following question:<\/p>\n

Have you ever seen an ugly fractal?<\/p>\n

I haven’t. I wouldn’t hang every fractal I’ve ever seen in my living room (even during my Roger Dean phase) \u2014 but it wasn’t the essential form that turned me off those iterations, it was the color scheme. And such schemes aren’t intrinsic to the math; they’re arbitrary, a programmer’s decision to render this<\/i> isocline in red and that<\/i> in blue and not the other way around.<\/p>\n

I would argue that fractals, as mathematical entities, are, well, appealing<\/i>. Aesthetically. All<\/i> of them. It’s something I’ve batted around with friends and colleagues at least since the mid-eighties, and speaking as a former biologist it has a certain hand-wavey appeal because you can see how an appreciation of fractal geometry might evolve. After all, nature<\/i> is fractal; and the more fractal a natural environment might be, the greater the diversity of opportunity. An endlessly bifurcating forest; a complex jumble of rocky geometry; a salt plain. Which environments contain more niches, more places to hide, more foraging opportunities, more trophic pathways and redundant backup circuits? Doesn’t it make sense that natural selection would reward us for hanging out in complex, high-opportunity environments? Couldn’t that explain aesthetics, in the same way that natural selection gave us* rhythm and the orgasm**? Couldn’t that explain art<\/i>?<\/p>\n

Maybe. Maybe not. Because firstly (as I’m sure some of you have already chimed in), complex environments also contain more places for predators and competitors to hide and jump out at you. There are costs as well as benefits, and the latter better outweigh the former if fractophilia is going to take hold in the population at large. Also, who says all art is fractal? Sure, landscapes and still lifes. Maybe even those weird cubist and impressionist thingies. But faces<\/i> aren’t fractal; what about portraiture?<\/p>\n

The obvious answer is that the recognition and appreciation of faces has got obvious fitness value too, and aesthetics is a big tent; nothing says “art” can’t appeal to the fusiform gyrus as well as whatever Mandelbrot Modules we might prove to have. But now along comes this intriguing little paper<\/a> (update 22\/11 — sorry, forgot to add the link yesterday) in Network<\/i>, which suggests that even though faces themselves are not fractal, artistic renditions of faces are<\/b><\/i>; that artists tend to increase the aesthetic appeal of their portraits by introducing into their work scale-invariant properties that don’t exist in the original. Even when dealing with “representational” works, evidently, true art consists of fractalizing the nonfractal.<\/p>\n

What we’re talking about, folks, may be the end of art as we know it. Go a little further down this road and every mathematician with a graphics tablet will be able to create a visual work that is empirically, demonstrably, beautiful<\/i>. Personal taste will reduce to measurable variations in aesthetic sensibilities resulting from different lifetime experiences; you will be able to commission a work tweaked to appeal to that precise sensibility. Art will have become a designer drug.<\/p>\n

Way back in the early seventies, a story from a guy called Burt Filer appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions<\/i>. It is called “Eye of the Beholder”, and it begins thusly:<\/p>\n

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Section 2, Sunday June 3rd by Audrey Keyes. Peter Lukas’ long-awaited show opened at the Guggenheim today, and may have shaken confidence in the oldest tenet of art itself: that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Reactions to his work were uncannily uniform, as if the subjective element had been removed…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Filer wrote his story before anyone even knew what a fractal was. (His guess was that aesthetics could be quantified using derivatives, a miscall that detracts absolutely nothing from the story.) “Beholder” wasn’t his first published work; in fact, as far as I can tell, it may have been his last. (That would be fitting indeed.) I don’t know if the man’s even still alive.<\/p>\n

But if you’re out there, Burt: dude you called<\/i> it.<\/p>\n

*Well, some of us.
** Ditto.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This whole stem-cell breakthrough is certainly worth keeping track of, but not here because you know about it already; it’s all over other sites far more popular than mine. Ditto the hilarious perspective on WoW which serves as the subject of today’s visual aid, starring characters which many of us must know (albeit in roles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-just-putting-it-out-there","category-neuro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}