The Science of Art

Gregory Benford from the May 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Much scientific evidence from the neurosciences, twin studies, sociobiology, physical anthropology, and genetics strongly implies that the nature/nurture balance is roughly 70/30 or even 80/20. The central myth of the late modern then, that we are born as blank slates to be written on by culture, is largely wrong.

Beauty, too, emerges from our biol-ogy. Our peculiar capacities lead to a natural classicism, connected to our neurotransmitters and endorphins. Rather than Freud's equation of the aesthetic with a sublimated libido, a model of brain reward implies that certain "lores" are privileged. Poetic meter has a line length of about three seconds, tuned to the period of acoustic processing pulses in our brains. We remember by internal echo for three seconds, then pass that to a longer-term memory system, which edits, organizes, and pushes the bit down to a less immediate level. Drive a natural brain rhythm, like the 10-cycles-per-second alpha rhythm, and large changes of brain state and chemistry follow. Poetry gets processed not by merely the linguistic left brain, but by the musical and spatial right brain. This stereo neural mode gives fresh power to ideas which are genuinely nonverbal.

Avant-garde music then often goes astray because it fails to use our wiring diagram effectively. Similarly, postmodern aesthetics' demand that we treat every visual element as significant, avoiding hierarchies, misses an audience. A species which used such a viewing strategy would be unable to throw a rock, dodge a spear, or catch falling fruit. Our "marvelously parsimonious cortical world-construction system" leads to a set of classical values, to which Turner predicts we shall soon return.

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring. A "bankrupt tribe of venal mediocrities who now infest the arts" decry the philistine mass, failing to note their own unmoored ideas, principally the notion that reality is socially constructed.

Turner shores up his general argument with many pungent observations, and
a few winding, fantastical digressions which lose the thread--he gives in to his sense of the epic. This gives a glimpse of his prescience, but at the price of coherence.

Still, this cogent, broad analysis will make many enemies, and deserves to be read for that alone; delicious cuts and thrusts abound. Unlike nearly all the culture warfare swirling about the maypole of politics, Turner's vision is positive.

Pay attention to the world, he says. It instructs.

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