Art and science share many characteristics, above all a spirit of research, love and wonder imagination, a search for the ultimate life meaning. Both feed on doubt. However, while the sciences start from the particular to seek universal laws, art is free to wander in the open sea and also feeds on nonsense and the irrational.
Only academies use canons and seek universal values. Art uses the rules, laws, canons, also to overcome them, break them down. Art and science have been associated for a long time, artists were also scientists and vice versa, ideas and experiences could not help but intertwine.
The Enlightenment which exalted rationality and the romantic rebellion, as opposed to reason, separated imagination and knowledge. Currently, the scientific world seems to have taken over. Science continues in its search for laws that explain the how and why of life; art is aimed above all at emotions, subjectivity and, as Heghel (1770-1831) predicted, it is no longer at the center of life. Art has become an end in itself, the so-called art for art.
Neuroscience
Science tries to resolve ambiguities, art feeds on ambiguity, metaphors, double meanings and nonsense. Neuroscience has brought these two branches of knowledge closer together. More than anything else, it was science that studied art. After Duchamp’s (1887-1968) intuition that meaning is given to the work not only by those who create it, but also by those who look at it, science has used art to study the world of perceptions.
Even abstract concepts such as beauty, love, pleasure, have neurobiological correlates, they are products of the biochemical and physical activity of the brain so that the nervous system constructs what we see, attaches meaning to perceptions, to the information that comes to it through the senses. Every day we open our eyes and create the world, neuroscience tells us. Poetry also declares this, like that of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), who with his heteronyms wants to “hear everything in every way”.
Some scientists have thought it possible to develop a scientific theory of artistic experience, believing that there can be universal aesthetic principles just as there are universal principles of physics. Semir Zeki (1940-) coined the term Neuroaesthetics looking for the biological basis of the aesthetic experience and Vilayanur Ramachandran (1951-) described nine universal laws of aesthetics. Zeki first studied visual perception and talks about “hereditary concepts” linked to brain functioning strategies that we cannot evade because they are encoded by genes and universal. He inserts in these the perceptive constancy, the chromatic constancy, the recognition of the faces, the recognition of vertical and horizontal straight lines, the symmetry.
Activating these systems produces the stimulation of the pleasure and gratification centers and which would be the reason why we find Mondrian’s (1872-1944) works so pleasant. Similarly, Ramachandran finds that the neural circuits of our visual centers embody universal laws which are also laws of aesthetics. All strategies developed by evolution in the brain to favor the survival of the individual in the primordial forest are those that this author believes are used universally by the artistic process.
Among these is the perceptual grouping: it helps to identify a partially hidden object, it serves to defeat camouflage and to see an animal partially covered by vegetation. The peak shift effect, on the other hand, concerns the brain’s reaction to hyperbolic stimuli and explains why we like caricatures so much, because the true essence, rasa, a Sanskrit term that means grasping the true spirit of a thing, is captured and exalted. These are already sufficient to stimulate some considerations.
Science uses art, especially the perception of the artistic work, to understand itself. These are more than laws of perception, therefore also valid outside the artistic process, of the preferential behaviors used by the brain on the basis of evolutionarily learned unconscious knowledge. It is not possible to draw universal laws and therefore generalizations, they are accompanied by many exceptions which are, in turn, explained in scientific terms. They can be used to explain some aspects of the perception of the work of art, but they are not valid for the entirety of the artistic creative process.
Infact, Ramachandran takes as an example of his thesis the fact that “A white color on a white canvas would certainly not be called art” when, on the other hand, Kazimir Malevic (1879-1935) painted in 1918 a “White on white picture” and a “Black square” which is become an modern art icon.
Art as language and communication tool
Art provides us with evidence of the functioning of the brain and therefore can be subject to scientific study, it can help us understand man and the complex dynamics of his nervous system, hardly leaves room for scientific generalizations. For Immanuel Kant (Prolegomena) (1724-1804), “the mind does not derive a priori laws from nature, but assigns them to them” and this is what allows the modern aestheticization of reality for which everything is art. Umberto Eco (1932-2016) had already asserted that “Traditional aesthetics were basically aesthetics with a priori structure and therefore the same normative. A characteristic of contemporary aesthetics, on the other hand, appears to be that of not wanting to be a normative science or of starting from a priori definitions, in short, of having renounced to found the possibilities of human activity on presumed immutable structures of being and spirit”.
The speech also includes the hypotheses of Zeki and Ramachandran. Art uses science not to seek universal laws, but to probe the collective or individual unconscious and use, often in an unconscious way, those iconic forms that Aby Warburg (1866-1929) calls forms of pathos, which recur periodically over the centuries, with clothing new, and which represent both the archetypal forms of myth and the Dionysian forces crushed or masked by the prevalence of the Apollonian vision of life. A consideration therefore arises spontaneously: why should universal laws of artistic work be sought using non-specific laws of perception mediated by evolution and equally valid in every type of perception of daily life? What need do we have to create scientific categories that are narrow in the field of art, language and communication tool that becomes novelty and growth precisely when it manages to overcome limits and constraints and indeed feeds on contradictions, ambiguities, different visions, lack of certainties? I end with the conclusions of Vincenzo Trione (1972-) in his book L’opera interminabile (The interminable work) which describes many variations to the perception of what art is: “I like to think of these artists just as cloud merchants”.
