Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Copy me, I’m on my way out

Published
by
peter
on 2010-01-21
in Art, Books, Culture and History
. Closed

Cosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth cannot understand why people desire original works of visual art rather than printed reproductions, especially when we’ve been buying printed books rather than manuscript codexes for centuries now.  He presents – and demolishes too quickly, I believe - some potential reasons for this.  I am very surprised by his view, but perhaps its the sheltered life I lead.

Thomas Jones A Wall in Naples

First, let me say as a computer scientist, that a map is not the territory.  It is easy to confuse a representation of some object with that object itself, and the people now singing the praises for e-books seem to be doing just that.   Au contraire, I believe that hard, physical books will continue to be purchased and kept yet for hundreds of years, and possibly many more years, because books are souvenirs of our experience of reading them.   The same is true of works of visual art.    If you have had some hand in the commissioning, the creation (for example, as subject of the artwork or as patron of the artist), or the selection and purchase of a work of art, you want the work of art itself, not a copy, to remind yourself of that experience.

Second, let me say as a former mathematician, that printed reproductions of artworks are projections onto 2 dimensions of 3-dimensional objects.  By definition, such projections will lose something.  If you think that what is lost thereby in visual art is unimportant, as Cosma seems to, then you’ve not been looking very closely at real paintings or drawings.  There are too many examples to recount, so let me just point to:  the brush-strokes in JMW Turner’s seascapes, which manifest and convey the torment of the scenes (and that of the painter); or the drip effects in Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, which likewise manifest and convey the energy of the creation process; or the careful, visible brushwork of the leaves and blades of grass in Pre-Raphaelite art or in the art of the Yangzhou painters of the early Qing Dynasty; or the brush-strokes in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy.   These effects are either invisible or can barely be seen in printed reproductions.  It is also worth noting that Chinese art has, for hundreds of years, supported “factory production” of 3-D paintings, using lesser-skilled artists to make approved copies of paintings by famous artists, usually under the direct, personal supervision of the famous artist him or herself; that these copies are purchased rather than printed reproductions indicates that the 3-D object has qualities perceived to be lacking in any 2-D print.

Third, let me say as a former statistician, that it seems to be easy for people familiar with Andrei Kolmogorov’s theory of complexity to imagine they have represented faithfully some object, when all they have captured is its surface form (its syntax).   As I have argued before, the canonical example used in discussions of algorithmic complexity is Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square, which is alleged to be easy to reproduce with an algorithm such as: 

Paint a pixel of black in each pixel throughout the square.

At best what this algorithm generates is a copy not of the 3-dimensional painting itself, but of a 2-dimensional projection of it.  But even were it to recreate the 3-D object, such an algorithm ignores the meaning of the painting and the historical context of its creation – in linguistic terms, its semantics (or its use-context-independent meaning) and its pragmatics (its use-context-dependent meaning).      Both these aspects are immensely important to understanding and appreciating the work, and for explaining why it appeared when it did and not before, and understanding its reception and influence.  As I noted before, one can just about imagine the 18th-century Welsh  landscape painter Thomas Jones eventually creating something similar to Black Square, since he painted contemplative, Zen-like depictions of seemingly-featureless Neapolitan walls (such as A Wall in Naples, pictured above), but no other artist before Malevich.

How is this relevant?  Well, once you’ve seen and admired Malevich’s painting, no printed reproduction would satisfy you for an instant. 

Finally, paintings – even when traditional, representational art – are best understood, not as representations of objects or scenes or feelings or indeed of anything at all, but as attempts at solutions to problems in painting.   Most solutions fail, so the artist abandons that attempt, and tries again.  In the meantime, the abandoned partial solution may provide pleasure and joy (or other responses) to those who view it, and to those who seek to emulate the methods of its painting which a careful study of it may disclose.

FOOTNOTE:  The post title is a reference to an Ambitious Lovers song.




Whereof one cannot speak . . .

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-24
in Argumentation, Culture and Religion
. Closed

Not all knowledge consists of propositions, and not even all propositions can be written down.  It is good to see Andrew Sullivan quoting Chinese Taoist philospher Chuang Tzu to this effect.




Knowing ways

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-13
in Anthropology, Argumentation, Culture and Religion
. Closed

Further to my post about different ways of knowing and recent posts on religion, is this statement from a story in the The Melbourne Age today, about Indigenous Australian footballers:

In her book Yuendumu Everyday, Yashmine Musharbash refers to the Aboriginal notion that knowledge is acquired through ”doing” rather than questions.”

Reference:

Yasmine Musharbash [2009]: Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia.  Aboriginal Studies Press.




Doing and believing

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-13
in Culture and Religion
. Closed

Alerted by Norm, I find myself reading Richard Norman’s defence of the new atheism here.  This topic is not new territory for Vukutu, as seen here and here.  There is little point in repeating my prior arguments, but something in Richard Norman’s argument requires a response, since (like so much of the new atheism) it seems to derive from ignorance of religious practice:

Of course it’s true that a religious community is not a debating society, and a religious service, with its prayers and hymns and rituals, is not an academic seminar whose business is to assess and defend theories. But the key phrase in the passage from Cornwell is “only partly”. The asserting of beliefs may not be the main preoccupation of religious activities, but it is still essential. Without the beliefs, the practices make no sense. Prayer is meaningless without a belief of some kind, however vague, that there is someone, a person, who is being addressed. Hymns of praise and adoration are meaningless without some kind of belief in a deity who is worthy of adoration. And there is accordingly no evading the question of whether these beliefs are true.”

Norman is profoundly wrong here.  When he says, “Without the beliefs, the practices make no sense,” he means, “They make no sense to someone wedded to the idea that actions have to be informed by prior beliefs.“    Most prayers of most people may have the syntax (the external form) of supplications, but that is usually not why most people pray most of the time.  If that were so, then why would intelligent, rational people keep on praying in the face of the repeated failure of their supplications?    Only a literalist (and, my goodness, aren’t there are lot of those among the noveau atheists!) would imagine that the syntax of an utterance represents the full extent of its possible meanings or uses. Rather, most people who pray or chant or sing hymns or attend church do so in order to commune with what they consider to be (or might be) a non-material realm, the divine.  In particular, people can feel drawn to interactions with such a realm (in the form of prayers or meditation, or through the reading of scriptures, or by attendance at religious ceremonies, etc) for reasons or motivations or experiences that they themselves do not fully understand or that they cannot even put into words.    It is possible, but not becoming, to mock these motivations, as Norm does here.  But mockery, although historically the standard  approach of scientists faced with phenomena they can’t yet explain (from magnetism to meteors to new planets), does not make the underlying experiences any less real nor the evidence any less compelling for those who have had the experiences or felt the motivations.  

As I have said before (and many have said before me), belief can be what comes after one practices spiritual activities long enough, not necessarily what leads one to practice them.   I suppose it can be great shock to a professor of moral philosophy that intelligent people may act without first having a well-grounded belief to justify their actions, but that is what most of us have done, in most cultures, most of the time, for most of human history.  It is surely ironic that the new atheists attacking religious ideas and practices should be so firmly in the grasp of a meme – that beliefs necessarily precede and inform actions – whose origins are in the Confessing Protestant ideas of the Christian Reformation, and one which is historically and culturally an aberration, even within Christianity.

POSTSCRIPT (2009-11-14):  Norm has responded to this post, here, and Martin commented here.




Theatre Lakatos

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-13
in Art, Culture, Logic and Mathematics
. Closed

Last night, I caught a new Australian play derived from the life of logician Kurt Godel, called Incompleteness.  The play is by playwright Steven Schiller and actor Steven Phillips, and was peformed at Melbourne’s famous experimental theatrespace, La Mama, in Carlton. Both script and performance were superb:  Congratulations to both playwright and actor, and to all involved in the production.

Godel was famous for having kept every piece of paper he’d ever encountered, and the set design (pictured here) included many file storage boxes.  Some of these were arranged in a checkerboard pattern on the floor, with gaps between them.  As the Godel character (Phillips) tried to prove something, he took successive steps along diagonal and zigzag paths through this pattern, sometimes retracing his steps when potential chains of reasoning did not succeed.   This was the best artistic representation I have seen of the process of attempting to do mathematical proof:  Imre Lakatos’ philosophy of mathematics made theatrical flesh.

The photograph of the La Mama billboard is from Paola’s site.

Incompleteness- lamama 2009

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Pommes frites with everything

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-03
in Argumentation, Culture and Rhetoric
. Closed

A Guardian editorial from 1989, published followed news that the French Government Official Dictionary of Neologisms had decided whether to adopt or discard over 2400 foreign words from the French language:

This concern with lingustic purity is clearly inspired by France’s envy of Anglo-Saxon practice, which, as is well known, sets its face like flint against all overseas importations.  Regular visitors to London report with awe on the capacity of the English of all social classes for keeping the language clean.  From the blase habitues of the London clubs – raconteurs, bon viveurs, hommes d’affaires – with their penchant for bonhomie and camaraderie, through the soi-disant bien pensants of the passe liberal press to the demi-monde of the jeunesse doree, where ingenues in risque decolletages dine a deux, tete a tete and a la carte with their louche nouveau riche fiances in brassieries and estaminets, pure English is de rigueur, and the mildest infusion of French considered de trop, deja vu, cliche, devoid of all cachet, a linguistic melange or bouillabaisse, a cultural cul-de-sac.

The English want no part of this outre galere, no role in this farouche charade, no rapprochement with this compote.   They get no frisson from detente with diablerie.  And long may it remain so.  “A bas les neologismes!” as you often hear people cry late at night on the Earl’s Court Road.”

Source:  The Guardian Weekly, 1989-01-08 (London, UK).




Two Nations

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-10
in Culture, History and Politics
. Closed

Ian Jack, writing in the UK Guardian today, describes the southern bias of the British Conservative Party leadership, particularly when contrasted with the present British Labour Party Cabinet:

To historians, the interesting thing may be that for 13 years spanning the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries Britain was ruled by a party born inside and chiefly supported by the Northern Metaphor, whose second prime minister wore so many of its qualities. Look at the constituency names attached to the members of its cabinet: South Shields, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Blackburn, Normanton, Leigh, Pontefract, Edinburgh South West. Out of its 20 members elected to parliament, 13 have seats north of the Trent.

The shadow cabinet tells a different story: Arundel and South Downs, Chesham and Amersham, Surrey Heath, Beaconsfield, South Cambridgeshire, Chipping Barnet, Havant. Twenty of 28 members have seats in southern England. England north of Birmingham is represented by George Osborne (Hatton in Cheshire) and William Hague (Richmond, North Yorkshire).

Jack also quotes Australian journalist Donald Horne (Disclosure:  whom I once shared an evening in a bar with), writing in 1969 about Britain’s competing metaphors:

In the Northern Metaphor, Britain is “pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and believes in struggle“. In the Southern Metaphor, Britain is “romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and believes in order and tradition“. The winner in this contest was decided at least a century ago when, in Horne’s words, Britons decided it wasn’t “for what they did but for what they were that destiny had rewarded them so lavishly“.

 

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Know-all

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-02
in Argumentation, Culture, Religion and Science
. Closed

Terry Eagleton has been a strong defender of religious belief, religious practice, and theology against the attacks of the neo-classical atheists, as in this interview here.  I have a great deal of sympathy with Eagleton’s aims, but he seems confused about performative acts, actions which may or may not imply propositions, and, when they do, certainly rarely imply propositions reasonable people can agree on.   Normblog, here first and then here,  attacks Eagleton’s account of religious practice.  In his second post, Norm is responding to a post by Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling, a post which defends Eagleton by discussing tacit knowledge and coming-to-know-something-through-experiencing-it.

Continue reading ‘Know-all’

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Evil intentions

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-29
in Culture, Religion and Science
. 1 Comment

A commentator on Andrew Sullivan’s blog asks:  Where is the Darwinian theory of evil?   Because  modern biologists this last century or so have been very concerned to avoid teleological arguments, modern biology has still only an impoverished theory of intentionality.   Living organisms are focused, in the standard evolutionary account, on surviving themselves in the here-and-now, apparently going through these daily motions unwittingly to ensure  those diaphonous creatures, genes, can achieve THEIR memetic goals.  Without a rich and subtle theory of intentionality, I don’t believe one can explain complex, abstract human phenomena such as evil or altruism or art or religion very compellingly.   

Asking for a theory of intentions and intentionality does not a creationist one make, despite the vitriol often deployed by supporters of evolution.  One non-creationist evolutionary biologist who has long been a critic of this absence of a subtle theory of intentionality in biology is J. Scott Turner, whose theories are derived from homeostasis he has observed in natural ecologies.   I previously discussed some of his ideas here.

References:

Alfred Gell [1998]:  Art and Agency:  An Anthropological Theory.  Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

J. Scott Turner [2007]: The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. Cambridge, MA, USA:  Harvard University Press.

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Learning jazz improvisation

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-11
in Culture, Getting-things-done intelligence, Human intelligence and Music
. Closed

 A few days ago, writing about bank bonuses, I talked about the skills needed to get-things-done, a form of intelligence I believe is distinct (and rarer than) other, better-known forms — mathematical, lingustic, emotional, etc.   There are in fact many skill sets and forms of intelligence which don’t feature prominently in our text-biased culture.    One of these is musical intelligence, and I have come across a fascinating description of taking jazz improvisation and composition lessons from pianist and composer Hall Overton (1920-1972), written by Jack Reilly:

Hall Overton, composer, jazz pianist, advocate/activist for the New Music of his time and a lover of Theolonius Monk’s music, was my teacher for one year beginning in 1957. I first heard about him from a fellow classmate at the Manhattan School of Music, which at that time was located on East 103rd street, between 2nd and 3rd avenue, an area then known as Spanish Harlem. This chap was playing in one of the basement practice rooms where I heard him playing Duke Jordan’s “Jordu”. I liked what I heard so much so I asked him where he learned to play that way. Hall Overton, was his reply. I took down Hall’s number, called him and said I wanted to take jazz piano lessons. He sounded warm and gracious over the phone which made me feel relaxed because I was nervous about playing for him. I had been playing jazz gigs and casuals since my teens but still felt light years away from my vision of myself as a complete jazz pianist. Hall was going to push the envelope. We set up weekly lessons.

Continue reading ‘Learning jazz improvisation’

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