The Drudgery of Art and the Flight of Mathematics

May my team never win a championship!

There is a tendency among academics to deride anything coming from a noted sports university. It has been quipped that it is doubly hard to get an article published if your school has won anything in the college football competitions. This is largely due to the not unreasonable assumption that an institution focused on winning championships will not devote the funds or care and priority to actual research or teaching that is needed to flourish. This is certainly true in some cases where professors have to waste time condoning the antics of stupid athletes allowed in only for their athletics and discarded as useless once they are of no more use in acquiring fame. Certainly they were not there for academics.

The financial drain that is college athletics (ostensibly they are self-supporting but the quality of accounting makes such claims dubious at best and attention is never calculated in any ledgers) puts other priorities such as equipment intensive research in a worse position but more creative fields less reliant on technology can proceed without too much trouble.

One frequently thinks of certain fields as being creative an others as simply needing persistence and discipline. That is true to some extent but in a way that is less likely to be thought of. Mathematics requires considerable persistence and discipline at the beginning but eventually becomes extremely reliant on the imagination of the mathematician to understand the varied relationships. Mathematics beyond the undergraduate level is an essentially creative field to the point where leading mathematicians can no longer do basic arithmetic without thought.

Art is traditionally considered a creative field but artists begin with ideas but then must devote much effort to finding taboos that have not been broken or ideas that have not been expressed and find their opening there. The actual disciplined approach of learning how to draw or use whatever medium is gone. Artists from former Communist countries now find work doing the portraits that American artists can't do as they never learned the technique. Instead of having much to work with allowing their imagination translate unto a medium, artists now have to find a message that is shocking or taboo enough (or incomprehensible enough) presented with the chicanery Barnum would envy. The "creative" process of art is thus turned into a tedious search for the as yet unbroken taboos (an ever diminishing supply) that will not get the artist killed or condemned but praised as a brave spirit among men who have never faced anything more dangerous than a ticket taker.

Creativity resides in different places than imagined and one can only marvel at the evolutions of such "creative" fields that turn them into turgid bastions of ideological rigidity that makes me long for the joys of Zhadnovschina.



Note: I do not really long for Zhdanov's return but art then was a good bit less political than it is here in 2009 and in America.

A few reflections on Art

Art was traditionally both a means of communicating beauty and ideals. The classical statues were designed to be both adornment and a focus for displaying ideals. The art of the renaissance attempted to communicate both beauty and truth. The beauty could be communicated by the quality of paint, scenes, humans in the picture and other factors. The ideas could be communicated by various visual cues well understood by a yet largely illiterate society.

The means of modern art are those of free expression. The central theme is to let the whim of the moment take ahold and see if the product is considered artistic. The spirit of art is considered to reside in the individual that the elimination of external constraints will allow the freer expression thereof. The act of self-expression is hailed as a value in of itself and ideas have become a more important element of modern art while shape has become a new element in the non-idea side of art.

The difference in the philosophies of the ancient artists is stark in contrast to many trendy artists. Why is self-expression valuable in itself? Is it that the pressure to communicate is more pressing? If so, the ancient artists and those under totalitarian regimes must have been remarkably unimaginative and left with little to communicate. Rather it appears that an element of modern culture is the narcissism that what one desires to communicate is necessarily worth communicating. The idea of beauty has also disappeared from the trendy artists and leaves us with more ephemeral concepts like “expression” or “profundity” that communicates nothing in any easily understood visual language. The ideas communicated in much modern work like Diego de Rivera and his ilk are those of separation and revolution. We’ve been down that sorry road before. The Italian futurists also supported WWI as a revolutionary event. The goal of shocking the viewer has become an element of a modern art that seeks to overturn taboos as limits on self-expression.

Yet did not the ancient artists also know how to express themselves. Did they not have emotions and ideas as well? They saw horror and yet could paint beauty while modern artists declared that there could be no more beauty in response to the SHOAH. They accepted the use of standard mediums of expression in a manner that the viewer could understand the message without and explanation that the saltshaker juxtaposed to the aspirin bottle on the chessboard is symbolic of something none but the author has heard of.