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June 28, 2004
TT: Irreplaceable
Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, has written a thought-provoking piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called "Art History Can Trade Insights With the Sciences." No link, alas, but here are some excerpts:As a psychologist previously trained in the humanities and in studio art, I have spent my career applying the science of cognitive psychology (and recently cognitive neuroscience) to studying the creation of and response to art.
To be sure, we scientists who wander into the art museum have to guard against many pitfalls: blind empiricism, testing hypotheses that are not theoretically grounded; unconsciously finding data to fit our theories; waiting for others to try to falsify our theories. We need to avoid reductionism: A scientific explanation of an artistic phenomenon -- say, why we are moved more by some paintings than others -- is not superior to a humanistic one, nor does it replace an explanation at the humanistic level....
To decide whether or not to accept a scientific explanation of an artistic phenomenon, one must evaluate the evidence. One has to determine whether the evidence supports the claim, and if not, how the claim could be subjected to further, decisive test. One has to think scientifically. And therein lies the problem. Humanists are not trained to think in terms of propositions testable via systematic empirical evidence. A scientific finding about the arts may therefore be unfairly rejected without a careful evaluation of the evidence....
Today neuroscience is moving into the study of the arts. Brain imaging allows us to track how the brain processes works of art, what parts of the brain are involved as artists develop a work of art, and how training in an art form stimulates brain growth. Scientists who do that kind of work will need a deep understanding of the art form they are studying. Humanists and cognitive scientists are, therefore, most likely going to be teaming up more to study humanistic phenomena from a scientific perspective.
It's interesting that I ran across this essay the same day I posted a link to a piece of scientific research with powerfully humanistic implications. As a card-carrying aesthete, you'd think I'd be resistant to that kind of thinking, but it happens that I once spent two years preparing to pursue a graduate degree in psychology, in the course of which I studied statistics, cognitive psychology, and experimental design (as well as spending more than a few sleepless nights trying to talk crisis-line callers out of killing themselves). Hence I'm more open than most critics to the kind of research-driven scrutiny of the arts about which Dr. Winner writes in her essay. At its best, it can be both provocative and illuminating--so long as the practitioners never lose sight of the ultimate end of art, which is beauty.
No doubt it's significant in this connection that I started out as a musician. Music is non-verbal and thus radically ambiguous, meaning that it doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis. Yet it is possible to talk about what makes a piece of music beautiful--or, at the very least, what makes it beautiful to you. Since I'm both a musician and an intellectual, I've scrutinized my tastes closely and analytically enough to have isolated certain musical "tricks" that I find especially appealing. I know exactly what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Fauré's bass lines, or the harmonies in the songs of Jimmy Van Heusen. To be sure, I can't tell you why these devices tickle my fancy. I can only apply Eddie Condon's empirical test of musical quality: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" (Philip Larkin, who when not writing great poetry was also a part-time jazz critic, swore by Condon's Law.) But at least I know what I like, and I have enough scientific knowledge to suspect that it will someday be possible to move in certain cases from what to why.
Still, Dr. Winner is quite right to warn of the dangers of reductionism, which is just another word for philistinism. You can teach a computer to play grandmaster-level chess, but you can't teach it to write a great symphony, or even a summer movie. The logic of creation is too fuzzy to be reduced to recipes. Seeing as how "About Last Night" is fast approaching its first anniversary, I thought it might be useful in this connection to recycle an almanac entry from this blog's second week. The French composer Olivier Messiaen said it, and I concur wholeheartedly:
I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I'd be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn't it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?
That's why I'm not afraid (at least not in the long run) of the effects of technology on art. Yes, technology is a many-edged sword, one that must be wielded by humanists so as not to slice our souls into bits and pieces--but the good news is that there has to be a human being holding the sword. It won't hold itself.
Posted June 28, 2004 4:27 AM
