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Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

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Stealing Cezanne’s Apples

                        

Just a week ago ( 16 November 2008) I posted “Arts and Science: The Surfeit of Neuros..” (on neuroaesthetics). It seems to have been prescient.

Now ( 22 November edition) ‘New Scientist’ carries a review, by Andrew Robinson, of Semir Zeki’s book ‘ Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness’.

This book, ‘by the world’s first professor of neuroaesthetics’ ( University College, London) claims to bring together Zeki’s interests in brain imaging techniques with his ideas on the arts and aesthetics.

For the clearest of given reasons, Robinson pronounces himself ‘ unimpressed’ . “ For all Zeki’s evident scientific expertise and love of the arts, he does not really succeed in using each to illuminate the other ”.

In fact, the damage being done to both – arts and (neuro-) science – runs deeper; ‘hypotheses’ seem increasingly to be tested not by rigorous experiment but by weight of rhetoric. I quoted Raymond Tallis on the damage being done “ by the  hyping of popular neuro-science in which some quite reputable neuroscientists seem to collude” … “ We hear daily of how brain science is ‘explaining’ happiness, love, moral judgement and so on “ - which comes uncannily close to the actual pantechnicon title of Zeki’s book. Tallis went on … “the neuroaestheticians fail to realise that their approach is, at the very least, a little premature”.

With some disbelief, I had also quoted the Financial Times’ 2002 report that Zeki,
with Professor Hideo Sakarta of Tokyo, was claiming “ to have provided art historians with a precise tool for accurately interpreting the techniques and intentions of old masters and art movements”.  I suggested that this level of sophistry needed a reincarnated Aristophanes to do justice to it.

But now we have more. Andrew Robinson is a careful and incisive reviewer. I was particularly grateful for his demolition of Zeki’s  attempts to annexe Cezanne
and his poly-green apples to his contrived theory of perception and colour; and his apt description of Zeki’s treatment of the complex ‘love’ motif in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as “ more ridiculous than sublime to my ears, and hardly scientific”.  Exactly.

He might have gone on to cite A C Grayling’s view,  also in New Scientist
( 4 October) that  “…understanding minds involves much more than understanding brains alone. It involves understanding language, society and history too ”.

There are dangers here. It’s time for the the arts and science communities to be on the alert and vocal; and maybe for UCL to think it all through a bit more clearly.