Is art good for anything?

[mountainFrugal]

As a follow-up to @bsog's excellent post above, I finally had some time to type up my thoughts.

I think that art is important in many ways. I will focus on visual arts because that is what I know the most about, but having spent time doing other art forms or reading books on creativity, similarities exist between all forms of creation.

Approximately 50% of our brains are devoted to the visual domain (directly or indirectly *). While we can design an environment that takes all the senses into account, the visual system is the one that dominates.

Drawing/painting, in particular, has a long human history. Writing is really just a newer invention that takes the symbols and shorthand of drawings and formalizes them for the sequential consumption of ideas that are usually spoken.

I think of the visual arts as taking objective data from the outside world or subjective data from your internal world and using the filter of your brain, which is a collection of experiences, personality, aptitudes, etc., to spit something back out the other side, iterating through it like @bsog stated. Drawing and painting are really ways of seeing. The more you do it, the more of the world you become aware of that you previously just ignored. This is true for details, color, lighting time of day, etc. In many ways, it makes general life much more interesting. The same holds true if you get good at identifying and expressing internal states/feelings/ideas/abstractions. You have more depth to be able to see the outside and inside world. This actually makes entertaining yourself for relatively cheap or spending 0 money an option for most of the time you are awake.

Just like practicing any skill, one can become quite skilled at being able to take in the data (internal/external) and output some sort of expression of that. This can range from drawing/painting a near-exact replica of a photo or existing work (requiring high skill + time) to a simple representation of someone's pose in a few lines. What is even more impressive is if you can create near-photorealistic images without a reference, but just using the accumulated reference images in your memory or creating something completely new from imagination. The same can be said for taking the mental image of an emotional state or abstract idea and being able to express that visually. An example of this was well put by @bsog, the example of getting the light/color just right to express how one sees someone else through a portrait. The better one is at these skills, the potentially higher the impact the art has on the artist and also the audience. If the artist is truly skilled, they will be able to move themselves and other artists in a similar discipline (other masters**). Multiple layers with near-limitless exploration potential. If the content is also popular, then the artist might also move laypeople with little time spent appreciating art.

With AI-generated art, it is likely that impressing other masters and the general public will happen at an increasing pace because the final "products" will be visually very good, but the artists themselves will remain relatively unmoved. Their filter is not engaged in the same way. This may change, of course, with more advanced AI, but art as a process is the name of the game, as stated by @bsog and me a few times in my journal. AI will not be able to move the artist in the same way for the foreseeable future.

All of this relates to ERE because often complex ideas are better expressed as images or a sequential set of images that gradually builds an argument/story/scientific discovery. This is especially true when trying to express something complex like a WOG (as noted by @bsog). A well-thought-out image or series of images has the ability to contain much denser information than writing can do on its own. This is why scientific papers usually weigh heavily on data visualizations***. The text is there to build an argument that is supported by the data, and vice versa. As an example, when I review scientific papers, I read the abstract, see the conclusion, and then go directly through the figures to see if the conclusion follows from the data. This will likely come more into play as various folks move up the WL scale. Maybe we will all eventually communicate in information dense images like the ones that @Daylen posts?

Part of my success in science is my ability to visualize concepts for papers, posters, grants, and talks. Interestingly, I learned more about how to give a good talk from reading Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" than I did from scientific talk YouTube. Sequencing information, simplifying it as much as possible for clarity without losing the truth, and thinking A LOT about the gutter space (space between panels or, in the case of talks, the phrases used between slide transitions). Non-scientists would be shocked at how bad 85% of scientific talks are. The content can be good, but the delivery (performance art) is terrible.

If we step out to storytelling in general, then we are even more aligned with the higher levels of ERE. We all have stories and narratives that we tell ourselves. If we want to self-author, we need to get really good at the art of storytelling. I do not mean telling ourselves fictions. I mean being able to take apart stories that we tell ourselves, analyze them for evidence, and then keep the pieces that are true. This is also called meta-cognition or thinking about thinking****. We can use our imagination to project ourselves into the future to figure out where we want to be or to explore critical aspects of our personality. This is all art mixed with a little analysis turned inward on ourselves.

* As humans, we only perceive a relatively small band of the electromagnetic spectrum with our visual system, and this is tuned to the environment we evolved in. What if we had the abilities of other creatures?
** Musashi - splitting the stem with his sword, only another master can truly appreciate it.
*** This would be different if the paper were more theoretical.
**** I am not suggesting all meta-cognition has to be narrative.


Suggested Reading:

- "Understanding Comics" - Scott McCloud
- "The Design Of Everyday Things" - Don Norman
- "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" - Rick Rubin

[jacob]

Approximately 50% of our brains are devoted to the visual domain (directly or indirectly *). While we can design an environment that takes all the senses into account, the visual system is the one that dominates.

Drawing/painting, in particular, has a long human history. Writing is really just a newer invention that takes the symbols and shorthand of drawings and formalizes them for the sequential consumption of ideas that are usually spoken.

I think of the visual arts as taking objective data from the outside world or subjective data from your internal world and using the filter of your brain, which is a collection of experiences, personality, aptitudes, etc., to spit something back out the other side, iterating through it like @bsog stated. Drawing and painting are really ways of seeing.

I think it's interesting to consider the dimensionality of the senses in that regard. (Also see viewtopic.php?t=12850). For example, smell, which measures the instantaneous point concentration of a chemical, is zero-dimensional. There is some kind of exponentially decaying moving average filter that eventually renders us noseblind. This is because the brain is more interested in differences than constants. New smells, not old smells. We have no control over this filter though and so there's nothing in our sense of smell that differentiates between and old (EMA decayed) strong smell and a new weak smell.

Whereas sound appears one-dimensional in time. The history of the sound waves matter in order to turn them into words. Metaphorically, sound is more like the tape of a tape recorder. We can effectively only hear one word at a time, but we hear them as words (or syllables). The brain then strings them together as sentences. If multiple people are talking, the brain is remarkably good at not paying attention to N-1 of them.

Vision is two-dimensional. The brain turns this into three dimensions in a process that we are effectively blind to. A trick to illustrate this is to close one eye and then press (gently) on the side of the eye. Note how the scene with the table shifts a bit. The table now appears in a different place. Now where is it really?!? An even more effective demonstration are the upside-down glasses. If people put them on, their world will initially appear upside down but after a few days it'll flip back as the brain makes the correction.

2D is much better than 1D for complex information which is why I prefer diagrams over narratives. There's a problem though in that including time sacrifices one space dimension. When communicating this can be compensated with by using color (heatmap) for one of the variables. (Funny that I also suspect my scientific breakthrough was due to not the science I did but that I was one of the first to use animated graphs in nuclear chemistry ... previously astro-people used an x(t) plot for each isotope (there are hundreds) spread out over the floor trying to make sense of them.)

HOWEVER! If one does not have to communicate, the possibilities blow wide open. Several N+3+1 (three space + one time + N qualities) can be reasoned out intuitively. Wilber describes this as vision-logic. It's also how Munger's Latticework works in practice. This is reasoning by metaphor and analogy---the "vision" part---which is rather different than reasoning by rationality which is closer to the one-dimensional linear argument as communicated by sound.

Another way of seeing this is that vision-logic is to logic what feelings are to emotions. It's a way of seeing (intuiting) the entire framework at the same time.

I would not call this art though due to the constraints of the logic. Specifically, I reserve art for the subjective and logic for the objective... even if the underlying processes are/can be similar.

[mountainFrugal]

To be clear... I do not think that the visual system is perfectly representing reality. . The brain post processing (not sure where visual system ends here) is doing a lot of heavy lifting. However, you can train it to focus on details, values, color, compositions, etc. which are the fundamentals of good visual art. Interestingly, visually pleasing (not in all cases) art pictures usually have a focal point of high contrast for the eye to hone in on. The contrast can be value, color, detail, etc. So in some ways the artistic filter is deciding what details (that would objectively be there in real life) to leave out. The artist is doing the work of brain post processing for the audience. This is another way to look at the filter.

What is interesting about comics is that you are doing this in multiple dimensions. You have single images that will fulfill this criteria, but you also have a narrative structure on top that is being fulfilled with the art sequentially. If you are reading western comics, then there is the layer of the page layout for the readers eye to go from left to right, top to bottom in a Z pattern down the page. The size of the panel in relation to the other panels as well as the information that is available in each panel helps to control how the reader experiences the time going by in the story. On a traditional two page spread, there is also the layer of storytelling where at the end of each page, and especially at the end of each second page, you can keep the reader turning the pages by including a minor question or cliff hanger. This is really fun to think about all of these dimensions.

In a similar way to @jacob, I measured and visualized plant respiration across a leaf developmental gradient and the entire life cycle development of the plant using custom equipment I built. This was my personal favorite science contribution.

WRT vision-logic - I think what you are describing is similar to having read in depth a lot of papers in a single narrow area and then suddenly "intuiting" the answer. You gradually pack in all of the linear arguments over time and make connections between them actively or passively until one day you see it clearly, but have no idea how to linearly reason back to the start. With art you are intuiting the filters that you learn over time to make what is considered "good" representations of art to you (subjective). You are using an artistic eye to decide what information to include and what to ignore or obscure. So I think I see the distinction between objective/subjective you are making, but correct me if I am not quite there.

(heading out for camping with the in-laws so will be delayed in any follow-up).

[jennypenny]

This thread still seems to be defining art pretty narrowly. Most of my life I've viewed 'art' as non-verbal narrative. Humans communicate and comprehend through narrative, and language provides a very limited palette. Now that I have two offspring immersed in the culinary arts, I've tweaked my definition to include anything meant to deliberately engaged the senses.

On a forum chock-a-block with stoics and Epictetus wannabes, I can understand why art is under appreciated because getting the human juices flowing is rarely the goal, and often seen as a hinderance to FI/ERE. And while I agree with Dutchgirl that Art (with a capital A) comes after basic human needs are met, art (with a lower case a) is seen in all of humanity including struggling societies. The music, art, and dance of what westerners would call 'primitive' communities is some of the most moving I've ever encountered, and I don't they they sit around pondering whether it's good for anything.

[guitarplayer]

Ha, I am guilty of promoting Epictetus around here, most recently today actually!

But I am also guilty of shedding a tear probably twice every three weeks on average, noticing the beauty of it all. Most often to do with music, which if physically one dimensional (jacob), is normally appreciated by music afficionados on multiple levels which I am sure any here will agree with. In fact, thinking of a physical gig, you have all the N+3+1. Have been on a bit of a music diet but recently somehow ended up attending a concert by Peter Gabriel. Never have been a fan, but some of his world music pieces at the concert were touching right at the core.

jennypenny I am with you on art and I would love to see more of it around.

A related question for artists: are you often, if ever, touched by our own art? I am.

[ertyu]

if art wasn't a basic human need, we humans wouldn't have bothered to make our objects beautiful as well as utilitarian. Yet in every single culture, people don't just make wooden furniture, they make carvings; they don't just make clothes, they embroider and create knitting patterns -- and so on. Art is part of how we mix ourselves with the world and make it a little more ours. Imo, the product of any unalienated labor is art.

i've read my own writing for self-indulgence. there's one person who knows best what you like, and that person is you. while i'm often frustrated with my lack of skill crafting prose, when it comes to content, i am often happy

[jacob]

A related question for artists: are you often, if ever, touched by our own art? I am.

Depending on how wide the definition of art is, I definitely feel "touched" by some of my creations e.g. a good turn of phrase or a well-written article, a piece of code that works, a piece of woodwork that I made. The feeling lasts a good 2-3 days where I can stare at those things for an unhealthy amount of time. E.g. watching a handbuilt clock go tick-tock, rerunning a piece of code that spits out the same result again even if I know what it is ...

I surmise that doing so activates a whole bunch of the brain. The brain recognizes itself in the creation or to use a word non-scientifically, the subjective resonates with the constructed object.

if art wasn't a basic human need, we humans wouldn't have bothered to make our objects beautiful as well as utilitarian. Yet in every single culture, people don't just make wooden furniture, they make carvings; they don't just make clothes, they embroider and create knitting patterns -- and so on. Art is part of how we mix ourselves with the world and make it a little more ours. Imo, the product of any unalienated labor is art.

Or humans who make art just have a lot of surplus time on their hands relative to the resources they have. The amount of decoration a human-made object receives is inversely proportional to the ratio between the cost of human labor and the materials. Currently resources are dirt cheap and humans are expensive, so the world is not very decorated ... unlike, say the 17th century.

[guitarplayer]

Hehe true, one takeaway from my recent Seth Godin binge was that the artist mode is the way forward. But he essentially means live player mode.

Today I built a metric that I need for work. Know it’s Sunday, couldn’t help it - made my afternoon.

[Western Red Cedar]

A related question for artists: are you often, if ever, touched by our own art? I am.

Most definitely. I'm probably most touched by playing guitar and making my own music. Something about the fact that I'm in a passing moment, creating something I really enjoy, but that it will only exist in that moment and is fleeting.

I will also return to a piece of writing or certain photographs which stirs up some emotions.

[daylen]

Good morals and truthful equations that are aesthetically pleasing or rhythmic tend to be the primary lenses through which more sophisticated morals and truths are considered. Some goodness or truthfulness can be given up for substantial beauty. Engaging deeply with morals or equations may get ugly for a while before leading to a more complete structure that retains much of the prior beauty.

[The Old Man]

"Is art good for anything?" is a good philosophical question. I believe the sentiments expressed by George Mallory while applicable to a different endeavor can also be applied to art.
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“What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? It is of no use. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.”

- George Mallory, English mountaineer, 1886-1924. He along with Andrew Irvine would die on Mount Everest in 1924. This quote is part of a larger expression which is reproduced below.
--------------------------------
People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise, nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

[daylen]

Consider art as a process by which plausible situations can be articulated in terms of a scene occupied by actors and props that tend to invoke certain states in agents that experience the artful scene setup. In other words, a prop of simulation, music, dance, sculpture, canvas, food dish, etc. is an incomplete work of art unless embedded in a scene that steers agents towards the intended flavor of states.

[daylen]

Cave paintings that turn walls into portals to alternate realities actualizing or culminating as the upper paleolithic revolution foreshadowing realities in the neighborhood of this one [of many].