Professional Documents
Culture Documents
www.imprint-academic.com/jcs
Donnya Wheelwell
[1] The research reported in this paper has been opposed in whole or in part by agencies too numerous to
mention. I hope that readers will not allow my occasional flights of whimsy and rhetorical exaggeration to distract them from the wholly serious main line of argumentation.
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conversation with loved ones, business phone calls, movies, and much more. In a
similar way, there is much more to art than that which can be reduced to
psycho-physiological measurements.
Todays psychology is the result of a long struggle to achieve scientific respectability. In the process, much of what is interesting and important to human beings
has been sacrificed for that which can be measured in repeatable laboratory
experiments. It is typical that topics like beauty are avoided, with attention
instead focused on more technical constructs like arousal. Robert Sternbergs
well-regarded recent textbook on cognitive psychology defines arousal as representing alertness, wakefulness and activation (Sternberg, 1998). Though I must
say that I find this definition still rather vague, it is certainly more precise than our
commonsense notion of beauty, and it has the advantage that one can relatively
easily devise ways to measure it in suitable experimental situations.
In this spirit, it would make sense to ask how, in suitable experimental situations, measurements of arousal (such as galvanic skin response, also known as
skin conductance response, or SCR, which is familiar from so-called lie detectors
and is suggested by R&H for use in their possible future experiments) correlate
with suitably elicited subjective evaluations of beauty. But it does not make sense
to simply identify arousal with beauty, as R&H have done. In fact, their paper can
be seen as a reductio ad absurdum argument against their unstated, unjustified,
and in fact unjustifiable presupposition that the quality of art can be determined
by measurements of arousal, since this leads to the preposterous and disastrous
conclusion that the best art is pornography. This is because, under normal conditions,2 it is precisely such stimuli that produce maximum arousal in normal male
subjects.
It is also important to note that the average female subject is much less aroused
(again, in the technical sense) by the nude female form than the average male
subject, because it is this observation that reveals the distasteful male voyeurism
implicit in many examples that are presented.3 I would finally note that the experiments proposed in this text, though undoubtedly interesting and valuable,
would, because of their specificity, be unable to establish the overly general and
grandiloquently named laws of aesthetic experience proposed by R&H, even if
carried out with complete rigour and success.
If we were highly evolved ants, our art would certainly be exceedingly different than it is. Its hard for us to imagine what might appear in the centrefold of the
Insect Trust Gazette,4 but no doubt the mode of reproduction, the caste-based
social system, the large compound eyes, and the sensitive chemical sensors,
would all be significant sources of that difference. An extrapolation from their
paper suggests that in undertaking such an exercise, R&H would focus almost
exclusively on a single sense modality (perhaps olfactory) and its associated
[2] We should exclude as abnormal stimuli such as intense pain, and subjects suffering such conditions
the nudes.
[4] With apologies to William S. Burroughs.
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Textual analysis
It is of the nature of textual analysis to work in a precise and detailed way with a
specific text. R&Hs The Science of Art is an appropriate text for this treatment
because it is representative of its genre, is of relatively high quality within its
class, and illustrates certain difficulties with a particular clarity.
No one who reads the R&H text, or even casually glances at its illustrations,
can fail to notice an inordinate focus on the nude human female form. It should
take little effort to see that this is offensively sexist and exploitative: the text treats
the female form as an object that is subjected to scientific examination, with no
connection to actual human beings or their actual life situations. Furthermore,
illustrating technical points with the nude female form, again and again and again,
may have the result of amplifying interest in the text at a subconscious level,
attracting attention from the popular press, augmenting sales and, most importantly, reinforcing the cycle of sexist exploitation.5
It may take a little more thought to see that there are deeper problems with this
text than sexism and exploitation. Let us start by noticing that the word pretty is
used to describe various artistic results of exploiting the peak shift effect
(p. 32).6 But this word is never used by serious artists or art critics as a synonym
for beauty; on the contrary, it would most often be considered an insult, because
the art community is acutely aware that art which strives for immediate appeal is
almost certainly shallow.
What then is it that makes art profound? Needless to say, opinions vary widely,
despite the strong consensus that the merely pretty cannot be profound.
Certainly no serious artist or art critic would argue that short term arousal has any
deep value. Many would argue that profound art should somehow illuminate deep
aspects of the human condition, for example, exposing conflicts, ambiguities,
sorrows, joys, their transitory nature, the inevitability of change, and ultimately
of death. And many others would argue that good art uplifts the human spirit,
[5] Note that the method of textual analysis, after identifying certain patterns and their effects, calls for
attributing the corresponding intentionality to the text itself, and only by metaphorical extension to its
authors, without any implication that the authors ever explicitly had such an intention. Hence the above
must not be considered an ad hominem argument; instead, it is an analysis of the text itself that takes
account of its social context in a broad sense. It is in the nature of textual analysis to focus on a text and
its context, rather than on its author, in much the same way that science focuses on an object and experiment, rather than on the experimenter. Thus, to be quite explicit, it is my claim that this text is by its
nature sexist and exploitative, because of the signs that it uses, the way that it uses them, and the probable social effects of this use. This is not to claim that the authors in their private lives are either sexist or
exploitative.
[6] Although this is the only instance of the word pretty in R&Hs published text, in an earlier draft,
which was circulated to potential commentators, it was used repeatedly (see Wallen, 1999). Moreover,
the use of this word captures very well the spirit of the R&H enterprise.
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suggesting or revealing what is best in our species and our world. In comparison
with such values, the approach proposed in this text can only be called superficial,
tawdry, reductive, debasing, offensive, and ultimately anti-human.
The appeal to higher values made in the previous paragraph (which could
easily be supported by numerous quotations from artists, critics, historians,
philosophers, and even some experiments) should by no means be considered a
denial of the importance of the low level visual processing that occurs in V1 and
related regions of the brain, as explored for example (with greater modesty, as
well as greater precision and detail) in the work of Semir Zeki (1999). However, it
should be taken as evidence that such low-level processes are only the beginning
of a much more complex and interesting story, presumably involving further
high level processing in areas of the brain that are more attuned to the emotions
and to prior experience of the world, including culture. It is remarkable that R&H
ignore both the prior experience of their subjects (such as their artistic sensitivity)
and all aspects relating to culture (e.g. preferences for or against bright colours).
Their use of Indian art is not cross-cultural, but rather based on the absurd
assumption that culture just does not matter. How can we possibly take seriously
experiments based upon such presuppositions, when it is well known that they are
false in a wide variety of similar situations?
Just because science is beginning to understand low-level visual processing
does not mean that that is all that is involved in art; exactly this kind of reductive
error is characteristic of the arrogance of science, and can be seen again and again
throughout its history. I have little doubt that future research will uncover
neurobiological, evolutionary and psychological bases for emotional responses to
art, and to the strong role played by prior experience, thus undercutting the crude
reductionism proposed in this text. Research of this kind, however brilliant, can
never reduce human experience and human values to impersonal scientific principles, because these belong to completely different epistemological categories
(Oakeshott, 1933/1966). It is a common and tragic error of Western culture
(though not of science as such) to fail to distinguish third person objective knowledge about things from direct first person experience of things.
The attentive reader will also notice a rather strong Indo-centric bias in the text.
For example, the third paragraph criticizes Western artistic sensibility, and argues
that Indian art is centuries more advanced in some respects; moreover, most of the
art that is most praised in the text is Indian. It is delightful to find a serious scientific text that goes outside the Western tradition for examples, and even its bias is
a welcome corrective to the far more usual Eurocentric bias of the scientific and
art critical literatures. But these authors have not provided careful arguments for
their assertions about Indian art, and it is doubtful that they have an adequate
appreciation of the cultural background of the Indian images that they exploit,
many of which come from temples, and hence undoubtedly have a religious
dimension that they have studiously ignored. Classical Indian culture was deeply
aware that there is more to human life than the enjoyment of the senses; indeed,
several important streams of Indian religious thought consider such pleasures as
merely one possible gateway to wisdom, provided of course that it is practised
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with an appropriate discipline. Hence it is very likely that the Indian artifacts
exploited in this text are neither art in the traditional western sense, nor in the
reductive R&H sense, but instead are religio-cultural icons, that have deep
multi-faceted resonances within their original contexts.
Conclusions
Reductionist approaches like that proposed by Ramachandran and Hirstein have
little to offer art, artists, or lovers of art, and moreover serve to perpetuate a
number of serious misconceptions about the nature of art, as well as a pernicious
and offensive value system. However, work of this kind could be of significant
practical value to professional pornographers.
Based on the relatively careful textual analysis conducted above, I nominate
this paper for inclusion among the most clear-cut examples of late twentieth
century sexist scientific and reductive megalomania. This text also illustrates the
deep misunderstanding of the humanities found among many of todays scientists, unfortunately without their being in the least conscious of their ignorance of
vast areas that lie outside science in the narrower sense, or of the dangers and
malignant consequences of this ignorance. In summary, this paper has argued
that, contrary to R&H, most art is more than caricature, whereas their paper
demonstrates that some science is less than caricature.
References
Crick, F. (1994), The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (London: Simon &
Schuster).
Oakeshott, M. (1933/1966), Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Ramachandran, V.S. and Hirstein, W. (1999), The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic
experience, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (67), pp. 1551 (Special Issue on Art and the
Brain).
Sternberg, R.J. (1998), Cognitive Psychology, 2nd edition (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace College
Publishers).
Wallen, R. (1999), Response to Ramachandran and Hirstein, Journal of Consciousness Studies,
6 (67), pp. 6872.
Zeki, S. (1999), Art and the brain, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (67), pp. 7696.