The Sage Forge

What the young Mister Sparacio seeks to explain is the fact that art can often be understood across widely divergent cultures.  From this he extends the notion that there is a central concept of art he calls the "artcore" that is universal among cultures.  Sadly he, and those from whom he gets his sense of direction, have it all wrong.

If we are really serious about understanding art let us ask ourselves a key question.  Is there a realm beyond which art ceases to be art?  In fact there is.  Beyond the human mind we can't be at all sure any form of sentience can recognise what we humans see as art as art.  Some great apes raised among humans have created art-like expressions on a level analogous to that of a young child.  Those examples invariably resulted from some prodding by their human hosts, however.  The conceptual foundations of their apprehension of these objects can hardly be separated from their exposure to human culture.  There is no unequivocal example of other animal forms spontaneously creating the kind of symbolic and totemic objects humans recognize as art.

This leads me to a blanket statement.  Absent a conceiving or perceiving HUMAN mind there is no art.  In other words the human mind is the medium in which art exists.

I believe this recognizes a simple truth.  The human animal is essentially the same creature regardless of the differences of the cultures in which it is nurtured.  Art is cross-cultural because it derives from the mechanisms we share more than from the cultures by which we are separated. 

An example of this at work can be seen in the fact that many people are prone to perceiving artistic forms in nature.  In the home of my youth, for example, there were hung numerous formal works of art, prints of Picassos, oriental paintings from my grandparent's days as missionaries in Japanese occupied Korea, and the like.  There were also, however, pieces of driftwood hung and appreciated as works of art, and my parents would collect rocks on family vacations which would be displayed for their aesthetic value alone.

This blatantly Oriental sensibility obviously was not beyond the comprehension of Western minds.  Had it been so on cultural grounds my grandparents, who had no contact with Oriental culture until they were in their twenties, could hardly have been sufficiently affected by their exposure to immerse my mother in this form of art-perception as she grew up in America's seeming cultural backwaters of Mississippi and Louisiana.  Nor would it have been possible for my father, whose primary aesthetic exposure prior to meeting my mother was to the wonder of a curveball, to fully internalize this love of any art at all- had art been a primarily cultural imperative.

Douglas R. Hofstadter's work should be intimately familiar to anyone who has had significant graduate study in both the Philosophy of the Mind and in Information Science.  This is one of the frustrations I have with the advance of studies of the mind in the humanities of the last thirty years, now that I am aware of Hofstadter's work. From last week's entry http://leejamison.com/blog4/2007/02/geb_a_lesson_in_humility.html , in which I discussed the foundations of the human mind, one can begin to draw the outlines of a comprehension of how a mind that derives consciousness out of conceptual structures could also become facinated with images and forms suggestive of such conceptual structures.  At its heart this is, in fact, what art is.  It harkens in various ways to the conceptual structures (Those of you wishing to "make room" for the avant gard in art theory listen up!) of our minds, causing them to ring, as it were, as a sharp sound might set the strings of a harp or piano to ringing.  A rock may evoke a model of our ideal place, or it may more purposefully depict an actual person.  Placed apart from humanity in the midst of nature it is, none the less, a rock.  It is the conceptual structures in our mind that accept (or even seek) a conceptual impression in the first instance or that recognize a conceptual expression in the second.

In coming entries I will continue to pursue this train of thought to strengthen the connections between the manner in which higher conceptual modelling make us what we are and how it also creates an imperative for visual, tactile, aural, and emotive expression.