Art & Perception

The question, “Who made an artwork?” affects the way we judge that artwork. I argue that the question “How did the artist make it?” is of equal relevance. My point is that the focus on “Who was the artist?” is an example of a more general question: “How was the artwork made?”

“Who made it?”

Imagine it were proved that the Mona Lisa on display in the Louvre is a copy of da Vinci’s original. This would be major news. It would not change the work on display, but it would change the way we view it. The value of the picture would be greatly reduced (especially if the original came to light).

This imaginary example demonstrates the obvious, i.e., who made a particular artwork is a critical factor in how we look at the artwork and judge its value. Perhaps this should not be the way art is judged. But in the real world, the importance of authorship is an inescapable reality.

“How was it made?”

Imagine, in another example, that a set of genuine da Vinci drawings were found, studies for the Mona Lisa. Imagine these drawings demonstrated that the Mona Lisa is an imaginary portrait, with the face based on drawings of a fifteen year old boy. This would be major news. From a technical standpoint, it would not be shocking; indeed, it would fit with normal Florentine practice of using male models for female figures. But from an aesthetic standpoint, we would never look at the Mona Lisa the same way. Our appreciation of this painting might not be diminished, but it would inevitably be altered.

We do not so often focus on the question “How was an artwork made?” Part of the reason may be that it is difficult to find answers. But as the above example shows, the answer to this question could be no less important than for the question “Who made it?” The reason, I think, is that the questions are related. “Who made it?” is simply a specific version of “How was it made?”

The title may seem to say the obvious, but in fact, it is not so simple. The problem comes because of the way we think about art and education today.

In the Renaissance, an artist received training from a master by working on the master’s projects. The master had a strong incentive to teach, because good assistants were essential for making a major artwork. Teaching was thus not separate from the master’s work. Instead, it was critical to the productive success of the studio.

A similar method is used for teaching at the highest levels of education today. For example, a graduate student in biology will do research in a specific laboratory, under guidance of a recognized scientist. Only a small part of the student’s education comes through “classroom teaching”. The scientist has a strong incentive to teach his or her students how to do real research, because a group effort is necessary for major research projects.

But art education today is a completely different story. Artists get paid to do “classroom” teaching. But teaching in this mode does not contribute directly to the artist’s own work. Instead, it becomes an impediment.

Why should the wonderful (and profitable) job of teaching be an impediment for artists? I think it comes from the way we think of art as a solitary endeavor. An artist can teach others, but is expected to work alone. This prevents the artist and his or her students from working together. It separates art from art education. A functional connection between art and education would benefit both.

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Related:

• On being an artist, “secret” #1
• Why is it so difficult to be an artist?

If there is one thing that gets in the way of productivity, it is a studio that is too cluttered to even walk into easily. How can a painter get into such a situation?

Easy. Take up sculpture.

Studio organization is always a challenge, even if I’m only working on painting. I think the reason is that when I’m feeling creative, I do not feel like organizing things.

But ignoring the need to organize can bring creativity to a halt. Paintings take up space, and so do the materials. But sculpture — in my case, clay figures and small portrait busts — causes a much bigger problem because the three-dimensional pieces take up a lot of room. Plus, they are fragile.

I’ve just about gotten the studio back into shape today. I realize now (once again) that keeping it that way is the difference between working and not working.

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Related: On being an artist, secret #2

This drawing is “one of Michelangelo’s most celebrated works in the British Museum,” in the words of curator Hugo Chapman. But did Michelangelo draw it?

To answer this question it helps to consider, is the drawing:

• similar to other works by Michelangelo?
• something that plausibly could have been made by someone else?

This figure drawing is different from other surviving drawings by Michelangelo, although it is clearly related to one of his lost masterpieces. But because of the unique history of that lost work, many copies were made by artists in the 16th century. The British Museum drawing is likely one of those copies.

Full-length version of this essay

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In the twentieth century, science came to understand that one’s experience of the outside world is an illusion. This is obviously so when a person dreams during sleep. In a dream, there is a rich conscious experience that is disconnected from outside reality.

When a person is awake, the situation is different, but only partially so. An awake person, in a sense, dreams of a world that has a close correspondence with the world he is in. The light entering his eyes, his sense of touch and smell, etc. all provide information that his brain uses to make the dream correspond to the outside world. The correspondence is close enough that the person not only believes he is in that world, but is able to act in the outside world in a way consistent with survival. When dreaming in sleep, a person also believes he is in the real world, but the paralysis of sleep prevents him from harming himself. An awake person can cross the street, or communicate with another person, because his dream world corresponds closely enough to the outside physical world for him to perform these actions reliably.

Neuroscience is supposed to be the study of how a physical object, the brain, can perform this remarkable trick. However, there is a barrier that prevents neuroscience from focusing on its primary goal. To begin to see this barrier, consider the following.

Whether a person dreams when sleeping, or when awake, there is a world in his head. This inner world must be a simulation, a model. The simulation of the world must be an approximation — there is so much stuff in the outside world that there could never be a perfect copy of it represented in a limited physical space inside the skull. However, the degree of perfection of the model world inside the brain is in some sense irrelevant. The important thing is, if there is a model world in the head, then there must be a person inside the head to experience, to be conscious of, to dream about this model world. This person (and he has a name, “The Homunculus”) has the same relation to the model world in the brain that the real person has to the outside world. If a person needs a brain to experience the outside world, then the Homunculus must need a brain to experience the model world. The more perfect the inner model world, the more obviously is this so. In the extreme that the human brain could have a perfect simulation of the outside world, then the position of the Homunculus comes to be a perfect simulation of that of the person in the real world.

Thus, the great insight of the twentieth century, that the world we experience is in fact in our head, tells us very little. It does not explain how we experience that world. If we need a Homunculus to be conscious of the world in our brain, then the Homunculus must have a brain of his own in order to be conscious of that model world, and in its head there must be another Homunculus, and the series must go on infinitely, yet it would still not explain anything. Thus we can conclude that the Homunculus does not exist, that there must be something else going on. Whenever we try to figure out what that might be, we return to find the Homunculus grinning at us. The Homunculus is an impossible being, but he is also the person we meet whatever path we take to try to understand consciousness. Since the Homunculus cannot exist, but he blocks us nevertheless, I refer to the Homunculus problem or barrier. While the Homunculus cannot exist, a barrier to our understand very evidently does exist.

The Homunculus problem represents a barrier to our understanding. It is a barrier so high and impenetrable that we have not the slightest idea of what is on the other side. In the entire accumulation of human knowledge, there does not seem to be a single idea or piece of data that offers a passage through this barrier. This is a remarkable situation. It is so remarkable that few people discuss it.

Neuroscientists therefore have a problem. They can study the brain, but they cannot study its most interesting properties. Most neuroscientists take a practical approach. They confess that they cannot contend with the problem of the Homunculus, and instead study what they are able to study. The brain provides an unlimited harvest of information for the scientist, and thus the practical approach is indeed practical.

A few neuroscientists take another approach. They say that there is no problem of the Homunculus. This is a bold approach. In times past, people questioned the existence of God. When a person questions the existence of God, then he can ask: “If God didn’t create this world, then where did all this stuff around me come from?” In a very real sense, this was the beginning of modern science. This is why I say that doubting the existence of the Homunculus barrier is a bold approach. Unfortunately, unlike doubting God, it does not seem to yield any insights or offer a path to understanding. The Homunculus, although an imaginary construct used to symbolize something we do not understand, is a lot more real than God, at least for science.

Neuroscience offers an unlimited opportunity to collect data. This is because the brain is so complex. Imagine that you made a list of everything that you can do, of every mental state, whether of reason, or emotion, that can take hold of your mind. For every thought, for every class of experience, there are neurons in the brain that form the basis of this mental experience. But because the various forms of mental experiences are so diverse, different areas of the brain, different sets of neurons, are specialized for dealing with different types of experiences. What this means is that for every item on the list you made, a neuroscientist can find that the brain is doing a different thing; certain neurons are active for some things, like listening to music; whereas other neurons are active for other things, such as playing football. In some cases the same neurons may be active in different tasks, but then the pattern of their activity will be different. Thus, neuroscience will never run out of opportunities to things of the form “area A of the brain does this” whereas “area B does this” or “these neurons show activity pattern x for this situation, and pattern activity pattern y for this other situation.” As long as this is considered to be an interesting pursuit, then neuroscientists will have jobs.

However, it is not obvious that this will ever allow us to penetrate the barrier of the Homunculus. I am tempted to say that the accumulation of this sort of data could never lead us to solve the Homunculus problem, but I hesitate because of the example of Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin examined a large collection of data, a collection of seemingly unrelated facts, and deduced the theory of evolution. As neuroscience seems to represent a huge collection of unrelated data, by analogy, another Darwin might be able to look at it all and figure out a path through the Homunculus barrier.

However, there is an important difference. Evolution explains the simplest basis of life. But the Homunculus, or rather what lies beyond the Homunculus barrier, is the product of billions of years of evolution. The Homunculus is not likely to be a simple principle, like evolution, but rather something very complex. For this reason I think that the analogy between neuroscientists and natural historians is of limited utility.

Neuroscientists are furthermore unlikely to solve the Homunculus problem because they do not try to solve it. It does not enter into any research grant proposal, because no one knows what type of experiment to propose to find the Homunculus in the brain.

If the neuroscientists are not likely to cross the Homunculus barrier, then what would be a good approach? I have seen two approaches that seem promising, in the sense that they at least offer some hope of solving the problem.

The first approach is to attempt to create a Homunculus in a computer. This requires first simulating a world, then simulating life in that world, then allowing that life to change according to the laws of evolution. If the computer could produce a realistic simulation of the world, and the simulation could run for a long enough time, then in principle it should create intelligent life, just as the real world did. If a computer simulation contained intelligent life, we could study this intelligence far more easily than we can study the real brain. Then we would have a chance to cross the Homunculus barrier. The problem with this approach is that the world, even a small piece of it, with all its atomic and sub atomic particles, is far too complex to simulate in a computer, or even all the computers in the world put together. Therefore, it is necessary to make a simplified simulation. But if the simplifications are of the wrong kind, then they may preclude the evolution of intelligent life. Therefore there is no guarantee that the project will be a success.

The second approach represents evolution of another kind. A computer is, in principle, capable of computing anything that is computable. That means that a computer is capable crossing the Homunculus barrier — if someone knew how to program it well enough. Computers are programmed using computer languages. The most primitive language of the computer is machine language, which is difficult and cumbersome for a human being to use for programming. For this reason, people have developed other more advanced languages to program computers. The interesting point is that computer languages can be built from other computer languages, and these languages can become ever more powerful — that is to say, that a person can tell the computer to do more interesting things with fewer words. Thus, while the neuroscientists toil in their laboratories collecting data, computer programmers, or at least a subclass of them, computer language designers, continually develop programming languages to make them more and more powerful. It is theoretically possible that by developing more and more powerful programming languages, these languages could begin cross the Homunculus barrier, perhaps without anyone realizing it. I think this approach is more likely to succeed in crossing the Homunculus barrier than the approach of simulating evolution, and far more likely to succeed than the neuroscientists with their study of real brains. The neuroscientist is a spectator of the computations of the brain which are conducted in a form of language he does not understand. A computer language designer controls computation with ever more powerful tools that he understands because he makes them himself.

It is not to be lamented that we cannot cross the Homunculus barrier. If we could, we could develop machines with consciousness, true artificial intelligence. An intelligent computer could combine the power of the human mind with the power of the computers that we use to control our world. The intelligent computer might regard the human being, rightly or wrongly, as a competitor; perhaps as a servant or slave; and perhaps, as unnecessary. Thus, crossing the Homunculus barrier might be the end of civilization as we know it. Even coming close to crossing the Homunculus barrier could be dangerous, because the computer itself might make the crossing without our knowledge. Indeed, how would we know if a computer were conscious? We might not find out until it is too late.

18 March 2006

When drawing, it is common that most of the drawing surface is left in its original state. In this way drawing is different from many forms of painting. Thus when drawing on paper, most of what is visible is the paper itself.

Also unlike many forms of painting, drawing is a place to play with initial ideas, first thoughts. To play with fragile ideas when sketching is to live in a world of imagination, but the physical paper that the artist uses is a necessary link to reality.

For these reasons, the type of paper that an artist uses can be of great importance, both for the final appearance of a drawing, and for how the artist develops his ideas.

If the paper does not look good, for some reason, it is more difficult to make an attractive finished drawing. For a painter, this in itself is not such a disaster, because he can use the information in the drawing to make a painting which will be attractive as a final product. The problem is that if the paper is not interesting to the artist, it can inhibit his initial creative work. This is particularly the case when drawing from imagination, when there is nothing else to look at except the paper (and what is in the mind, of course).

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find ready-made paper that is suitable. For this reason, the artist often can benefit by taking the matter into his own hands.

One traditional way to do this, described in detail by Cennino Cennini in th 14th century, is to paint, or “tint” papers using some form of water-based medium. As he explains, “you may make your tints inclined toward pink, or violet, or green; or bluish, or greenish gray, that is, drab colors; or flesh colored, or any way you please”.

Tinting paper is the fastest and least expensive ways to “make” paper. One begins with ready-made paper, but then makes it one’s own.

I have had a lot of good results with tinted paper. By changing a white sheet into a blue one, it becomes possible to draw or paint with both white and black, to develop both lights and shadows, and let the paper act as the middle tone. And a tinted sheet is interesting to look at because the tint is never perfectly even. In fact, every tinted sheet is a simple painting in its own right, before it is used for drawing.

However, tinting paper does not enable one to recreate many of handmade papers used in the past, which are special not only because of their color, but because of their texture.

Texture in a paper comes from a variety of factors. Texture can come from the mold on which the paper was formed. It can come from the felts used to transfer the paper from the mold. The texture is also modified by the way the paper is pressed and dried. In other words, the texture of a paper depends on all the steps by which it was transformed from wet pulp into dried sheet. And then we must not forget the nature of the pulp itself, because the way this was made, and the source of the pulp (wood or rags of different cloths, or other plant fibers) all have an impact on the final outcome. When we consider that there are so many factors that determine what a paper is like, and when we consider that nearly every factor is different for modern papers as compared to papers of, say, the Renaissance, it is hardly surprising that a person would become frustrated if they went to an art shop and said, “Please sell me paper similar to what Michelangelo used for his drawings.” To recreate Michelangelo’s papers would require recreating all aspects of the paper making process, from worn-out linen rags to pressed sheets. And exact nature of these steps is not known to us.

Why is the texture of a paper important? This topic will be dealt with in more detail in a forthcoming essay on drawing.

The short answer is that with every drawing medium (except perhaps pen and ink), the texture of the paper determines how the drawing material becomes distributed on the paper. That is to say, the paper has a great deal to say about what a drawing will look like. An artist, making the same hand motions, would produce two different types of pictures if he used two papers with different textures. Some of the most subtle effects of drawing depend on this factor, although it is something that cannot be reproduced well in photographs. Paper texture, and its effects on drawing, are best appreciated in person.

It is probably inevitable that someone interested in the drawing techniques of a master like Michelangelo would become a keen student of his papers. This because it is not possible to understand how Michelangelo’s drawings came to look the way they did without having access to paper of approximately the same characteristics.

Sometime in the 14th century, Cennino d’Andrea Cennini wrote Il Libro dell’ Arte. The book is a treasure because of its detailed information about a wide range of artistic techniques. For Cennini and his contemporaries, using natural mineral pigments was the best option available to create intense and lightfast blue colors.

Mineral azurite yields a handsome blue pigment, somewhat “warm” or inclined slightly towards green. Ultramarine was purified by a labor-intensive process from the lapis lazuli stone, and yielded the most pure blue available. Although the stone itself was semi-precious, the purified pigment was considered a treasure.

These natural blue colors are intense, but not so intense as modern synthetic colors. This meant that painters of past centuries could strive to produce the strongest blues possible, and still arrive at results that were poetic, rather than garish. In contrast, the modern painter, working with colors from a tube, must often fight with the colors, to take away some of their overpowering intensity.

The painting here is an “imaginary portrait” which I painted with oil on panel in 2002. The blues here are underpainted in azurite, and overpainted with natural purified ultramarine, using varying admixtures of white. Differences in the pigment particle size and the degree of purification have an important influence on the colors.

14 March 2006