A curious but common art form

A curious art form that blends nature with artifice is endemic in our culture, and likely a cultural universal. Many people modify their bodies (e.g., muscle building, hair-styling, etc.) and then combine them in harmonious ways with other physical objects attached to the body, such as paint, clothing, jewelry, etc., deliberately to create a work of art that is a hybrid of a living thing and typically (but not always) non-living accessories.

A large proportion of our population engages in this art form on a daily basis, but I don’t know a good name for the works of this art in the languages I know. We have two English words that come close, “fashion” and “cosmetics”, but both are specific to aspects of the art rather than the work as a whole. We might try to explain this odd lack by saying that there is a sense in which the work is the person (for, after all, normally when we imagine a person, we imagine them accoutred). We might call the art form "anthropocosmetique", using the archaic spelling to hearken back etymologically to earlier English uses (evoking shades of Bulwer's use of "cosmetique" and his specific contexts) that may be closer to the Greek roots, but also emphasizing the human component in the work.

An interesting feature of the works of anthropocosmetique art is their diachronic character. They are often created for a specific occasion—a day, a party, a liturgical celebration—and disassembled into their constituents afterwards, typically without any feeling that one has destroyed something of great value in disassembly.

At the same time, some people engage in a larger art form, one spread over multiple occasions, consisting of sequences of the anthropocosmetique art, with similarities and differences from occasion to occasion in the particular works of each occasion being aesthetically relevant perhaps in something like the way that themes and variations are the warp and weft (not respectively) of music.

Sometimes there is a melding between the anthropocosmetique and other art forms, especially performance arts like dance.

And another curious fact is that many of the most famous works of fine art are actually meta-art: they are themselves portrayals of the works of the anthropocosmetique art.

Alligator statue

Waco riverwalk, Yashica 12, HPS5+

Theism and Natural Law

One occasionally wonders what theism adds to Natural Law ethics. Here is one example.

• Q1: Why are artistic endeavors good?

Here, Natural Law answers by itself, without any help from theism:

• A1: Because they fulfill the human nature.

We can ask another question:

• Q2: Why do artistic endeavors fulfill the human nature?

Again, Natural Law answers by itself in a not very informative way:

• A2: Because necessarily the human nature teleologically directs its possessors to artistic endeavors.

But we can now ask a different question:

• Q3: Why are there beings with a nature that teleologically directs its possessors to artistic endeavors?

Natural Law by itself has no answer. Theism can go on to answer Q3:

• A3: God created beings with such a nature because artistic endeavors imitate God, who is the Good Itself.

One might say that Q3 is an etiological rather than normative question, and hence lies beyond the scope of value theory. But A3 also answers a value-theoretic variant of Q3:

• Q3a: What is it about artistic endeavors that makes them apt for being intrinsically good for a being, apt for being the telos of a nature?

To see the force of Q3a, imagine that we meet aliens and they spend a lot of time and energy on some activity that does not seem to conduce to or constitute any biological end of theirs, and does not seem to promote any end that we can understand. We ask the aliens about why they do this activity, and they say: “It’s good for us in and of itself, and our observation of your culture shows that you have no concept of this type of good.” They are otherwise smart and morally sensitive, so we trust that the activity is good for them, that it is a telos of their nature.

But even after we have learned that the activity is a telos of their nature and hence intrinsically good for them, we would be puzzled by the activity, and what makes it apt for being a good for them. A theistic story about how this good imitates God provides an answer to this kind of a question.

The question suggests, too, that not everything is apt for being good for a being, that not everything is apt for being the telos of a nature. And that, too, seems right. It does not seem that one could have a being for which the production of ugliness or the promotion of the suffering of others is intrinsically good. But I think only a theist can say something like that.

Indeed, this last point suggests another way in which theism helps Natural Law. Consider this objection to Natural Law:

• Cruelty would be wrong even for beings whose nature it was to be cruel, but according to Natural Law, if a being’s nature were to be cruel, cruelty would be right for that being.

But the theist can do something to help with this: cruelty is just not the sort of thing that a nature could aim at, since it is counterimitative of God. So the conditional about beings whose nature is to be cruel is a per impossibile one. And it is not surprising if strange results follow from impossible suppositions.

Non-propositional representations

I used to think that it’s quite possible that all our mental representations of the world are propositional in nature. To do that, I had to have a broad notion of proposition, much broader than what we normally consider to be linguistically expressible. Thus, I was quite happy with saying that Picasso’s Guernica expresses a proposition about war, a proposition that cannot be stated in words. Similarly, I was quite fine—my Pittsburgh philosophical pedigree comes out here—with the idea that an itch or some other quale might represent the world propositionally.

That broad view of propositions still sounds right. But I am now thinking there is a different problem for propositionalism about our representational states: the problem of estimates. A lot of my representations of the world are estimates. When I estimate my height at six feet, there is a proposition in the vicinity, namely the proposition that my height is exactly six feet. But that proposition is one that I am quite confident is false. There are even going to be times when I wouldn’t even want to say that my best estimate of something is approximately right—but it’s still my best estimate.

The best propositionally-based of what happens when I estimate my height at six feet seems to me to be that I believe a proposition about myself, namely that my evidence about my height supports a probability density whose mean is at six feet. But there are two problems with this. First, the representational state now becomes a representation of something about me—facts about what evidence I have—than about the world. Second, and worse, I don’t know that I would stick my neck out far enough to even make that claim about evidence unequivocally—my insight into the evidence I have is limtied. Moreover, even concerning evidence, what I really have is only estimates of the force of my evidence, and the problem comes back for them.

So I think that estimating is a way of representing that is not propositional in nature. Notice, though, that estimates are often well expressible through language. So on my view, linguistic expressibility (in the ordinary sense of “linguistic”—maybe there is such a thing as the “language of painting” that Picasso used) is neither necessary for a representation of the world to be propositional in nature.

I now wonder whether vagueness isn’t something similar. Perhaps vague sentences represent the world but not propositionally. But just as we can often—but not always—reason as if sentences expressing estimates expressed propositions, we can often reason as if vague sentences expressed propositions. The “logic” of the non-propositional representations is close enough to the logic of propositional ones—except when it’s not, but we can usually tell when it’s not (e.g., we know what sorts of gruesome inferences not draw from the estimate that a typical plumber has 2.2 children).

Two beauties

In a number of cases of beauty, beauty is doubled up: there is the beauty in an abstract state of affairs and there is the beauty in that state of affairs being real, or at least real to an approximation. For instance, the mathematics of Relativity Theory is beautiful in itself. But that it is true (or even approximately true) is also beautiful.

This shows an interesting aspect of superiority that painting and sculpture have over the writing of novels. The novelist discovers a beautiful (in a very broad sense of the word, far broader than the “pretty”) abstract state of affairs, and then conveys it to us. But the painter and sculptor additionally doubles the beauty by making something real an instantiation of it, and it is by making that instantiation real that they convey it to us. The playwright is somewhere in between: the beautiful state of affairs is made approximately real by a play.

The above sounds really Platonic. But we can also read it in an Aristotelian way, if we understand the abstract states of affairs as potentialities. The painter, sculptor and novelist all discover a beautiful potentiality. The painter and sculptor brings that potentiality to actuality. The novelist merely points it out to us.

Three places for beauty in representational art

There seem to be three senses in which beauty can be found in a piece of representational art:

1. The piece represents something as beautiful.

2. The piece in and of itself is beautiful.

3. The task of representing is performed beautifully.

One can have any one of the three without the others. For instance, the one-line poem “The kitty was pretty” satisfies 1 but fails 2 and 3. Though, to be precise, I think sense 1 is not a real case of something being beautiful, but only of something being represented as beautiful. The kitty could be ugly and yet described as pretty.

I think 3 is particularly interesting. It opens up the way for works of art that are in themselves not beautiful and that do not represent beauty, but which do a beautiful job of representing their objects (Sartwell says that Picasso’s Guernica may be beautiful; I think my aspect 3 of the beauty of representational art may explain this). Note that “beautiful” here does not merely mean “accurate”, as the case of my one-line poem shows, since that poem may represent the beauty of a cat with perfect accuracy, but there is very little of the beautiful about how it accomplishes this.

Fundamental bearers of aesthetic properties

I am finding myself frustrated trying to figure out whether the fundamental bearers of aesthetic properties are mental states or things out in the world. When I think about the fact that there does not seem to be any significant difference between the beauty of music that one actually listens to with one’s ears versus “music” that is directly piped to the auditory center of the brain, that makes me think that the fundamental bearers of aesthetic properties are mental states.

But on the other hand, when I think about the beauty of character exhibited by a Mother Teresa, I find it hard to think that it is my mental states—say, my thoughts about Mother Teresa—that bear the fundamental aesthetic properties. If I thought that it was my mental states that are the bearers of aesthetic properties, then I would think that a fictional Mother Teresa is just as beautiful as a real one. But it seems to me that a part of the beauty of the real Mother Teresa is that she is real.

Perhaps the fundamental bearers of aesthetic properties vary. For music and film, perhaps, the fundamental bearers are mental states: the experiences one paradigmatically has when listening and viewing (but which one could also have by direct brain input). For the characters of real people, perhaps, the fundamental bearers are the people themselves or their characters. For the characters of fictional people, perhaps, the fundamental bearers are mentally constituted (in the mind of the author or that of the audience or both).

Maybe the beauty of a real person is a different thing from the beauty of a fictional character. This kind of makes sense. For we might imagine an author who creates a beautiful work of literature portraying a nasty person: the nasty person qua fictional character is beautiful, but would have been ugly in real life, perhaps.

But I hate views on which we have such a pluralism of fundamental bearers of a property.

Non-propositional conveyance

One sometimes hears claims like:

1. There are things that can be conveyed through X (poetry, novels, film, art, music, etc.) that cannot be conveyed propositionally.

But what kind of a thing are those things? Facts? Not quite. For while some of the “things that can be conveyed … that cannot be conveyed propositionally” are in fact real and true, some are not. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Fritz Lang’s M are both good candidates for conveying “things … that cannot be conveyed propositionally”. But Triumph in doing so conveys falsehoods about the Nazi Party while M conveys truths about the human condition. But facts just are. So, the “things” are not just facts.

What I said about Triumph and M is very natural. But if we take it literally, the “things” must then be the sorts of things that can be true or false. But the primary bearers of truth are propositions. So when we dig deeper, (1) is undermined. For surely we don’t want to say that Triumph and M convey propositions that cannot be conveyed propositionally.

Perhaps, though, this was too quick. While I did talk of truth and falsehood initially, perhaps I could have talked of obtaining and not obtaining. If I did that, then maybe the “things” would have turned out to be states of affairs (technically, of the abstract Plantinga sort, not of the Armstrong sort). But I think there is good reason to prefer propositions to states of affairs here. First, it is dubious whether there are impossible states of affairs. But not only can X convey things that aren’t so, it can also convey things that couldn’t be so. A novel or film might convey ethical stuff that not only is wrong, but couldn’t be right. Second, what is conveyed is very fine-grained, and it seems unlikely to me that states of affairs are fine-grained enough. The right candidate seems to be not only propositions, but Fregean propositions.

But (1) still seems to be getting at something true. I think (1) is confusing “propositionally” with “by means of literalistic fact-stating affirmative sentences”. Indeed:

2. There are things that can be conveyed through X (poetry, novels, film, art, music, etc.) that cannot be conveyed by means of literalistic fact-stating affirmative sentences.

(Note the importance of the word “conveyed”. If we had “expressed”, that might be false, because for any of the “things”, we could stipulate a zero-place predicate, say “xyzzies”, and then express it with “It xyzzies.” But while that sentence manages to express the proposition, it doesn’t convey it.)

An argument for theism from certain values

Some things, such as human life, love, the arts and humor, are very valuable. An interesting question to ask is why they are so valuable?

A potential answer is that they have their value because we value (desire, prefer, etc.) them. While some things may be valuable because we value them, neither life, love, the arts nor humor seem to be such. People who fail to value these things is insensitive: they are failing to recognize the great value that is there. (In general, I suspect that nothing of high value has the value it does because we value it: our ability to make things valuable by valuing them is limited to things of low and moderate value.)

A different answer is that these things are necessarily valuable. However, while this may be true, it shifts the explanatory burden to asking why they are necessarily valuable. For simplicity, I’ll thus ignore the necessity answer.

It may be that there are things that are fundamentally valuable, whose value is self-explanatory. Perhaps life and love are like that: maybe there is no more a mystery as to why life or love is valuable than as to why 1=1. Maybe.

But the arts at least do not seem to be like this. It is puzzling why arranging a sequence of typically false sentences into a narrative can make for something with great value. It is puzzling why representing aspects of the world—either of the concrete or the abstract world—in paint on canvas can so often be valuable. The value of the arts is not self-explanatory.

Theism can provide an explanation of this puzzling value: Artistic activity reflects God’s creative activity, and God is the ultimate good. Given theism it is not surprising that the arts are of great value. There is something divine about them.

Humor is, I think, even more puzzling. Humor deflates our pretensions. Why is this so valuable? Here, I think, the theist has a nice answer: We are infinitely less than God, so deflating our pretensions puts us human beings in the right place in reality.

There is much more to be said about arts and humor. The above is meant to be very sketchy. My interest here is not to defend the specific arguments from the value of the arts and humor, but to illustrate arguments from value that appear to be a newish kind of theistic argument.

These arguments are like design arguments in that their focus is on explaining good features of the world. But while design arguments, such as the argument from beauty or the fine-tuning argument, seek an explanation of why various very good features occur, these kinds of value arguments seek an explanation of why certain features are in fact as good as they are.

The moral argument for theism is closely akin. While in the above arguments, one seeks to explain why some things have the degree of value they do, the moral argument can be put as asking for an explanation of why some things (more precisely, some actions) have the kind of value they do, namely deontic value.

Closing remarks

1. Just as in the moral case, there is a natural law story that shifts the argument’s focus without destroying the argument for theism. In the moral case, the natural law story explains why some actions are obligatory by saying that they violate the prescriptions for action in our nature. But one can still ask why there are beings with a nature with these prescriptions and not others. Why is it that, as far as we can tell, there are rational beings whose nature prescribes love for neighbor and none whose nature prescribes hatred for neighbor? Similarly, we can say that humor is highly valuable for us because our nature specifies humor as one of the things that significantly fulfills us. (Variant: Humor is highly valuable for us because it is our nature to highly value it.) But we can still ask why there are rational beings whose nature is fulfilled by the arts and humor, and, as far as we can tell, none whose nature is harmed by the arts or humor. And in both the deontic and non-deontic cases, there is a theistic answer. For instance, God creates rational beings with a nature that calls on them to laugh because any beings that he would create will be infinitely less than God and hence their sensor humor will help put them in the right place, thereby counteracting the self-aggrandizement that reflection on one’s own rationality would otherwise lead to.

2. Just as in the moral case there is a compelling argument from knowledge—theism provides a particularly attractive explanation of how we know moral truths—so too in the value cases there is a similar compelling argument.

Everything is beautiful

Consider something visually ugly, say one of my school painting projects. The colors are poorly chosen and the lines don’t do a good job representing what it’s meant to represent. (I am not being modest.)

But now suppose we live in an infinite universe or a multiverse, so that every possible intelligent species is realized. It is very likely that there will be some intelligent species whose electromagnetic spectral receptivities are such that the colors in the lines look gorgeous to it, and harmonize in a wonderful abstract way with the shape of the lines. This is, of course, a chance matter—I wasn’t making the painting for that mode of visual receptivity. Let’s say that the species is the xyllians. We can still say that what I made is an ugly work of art, but it is also a part of the natural world, and considered as a part of the natural world it is visually_x (i.e., as seen with the electromagnetic reception apparatus of xyllians) beautiful while being visually_h (i.e., as seen with human electromagnetic reception apparatus) beautiful.

Moreover, it is irrelevant whether the xyllians and humans exist. Whether they exist or not, my painting is visually_x beautiful and visually_h ugly. All that’s needed is that the xyllians and humans could exist. Thus, my painting really is both beautiful and ugly, even if we are the only intelligent species. And it is just as objectively beautiful as it is objectively ugly. I wasn’t supposing that the xyllians misperceive: just that they have a different pattern of spectral receptivities. We can suppose that xyllian visual perception is just as accurate in reflecting the world, including my unhappy artistic productions, as ours is.

This means that an argument from particular beauty for the existence of God must be run cautiously. Sure, sunsets and goldfish are beautiful. But so is any child’s scrawl, and quite likely any physical object is beautiful with respect to some possible sensory apparatus. Particular instances of beauty are easy to find and should not surprise us. What could surprise us, however, is:

1. That the particular sensorily beautiful things around us—such as sunsets and goldfish—are in fact beautiful with respect to the sensory apparatus of the intelligent species that dwells near them.

We might also attempt to mount arguments from beauty to God on the basis of these remarkable facts:

2. That there is such a property as (objective) beauty at all.

3. That we are able to perceive beauty.

4. That we enjoy beauty.

5. That we are able to make correct judgments of beauty.

And bracketing the question of arguing for the existence of God on the basis of beauty, the realization that all material things are beautiful should lead us to glorify God. For while I said that it’s chance that my poor attempts at painting are visually_x beautiful, that’s only so loosely speaking. God is omnirational, and that the paintings are visually_x beautiful is a redeeming quality that surely God did not fail to intend.

Main academic task right now

My main academic task right now is revising my Infinity, Causation and Paradox book manuscript in light of referee comments. One of the tasks a referee set me is including more diagrams (the original only had one). This is a fun break from writing. I'm doing some of the drawings with TikZ right in the LaTeX file, and some I'm drawing with Inkscape.

Here's Smullyan's rod with exponentially decreasing density (to ensure finite total force). It's a rigid rod suspended over an infinite plane, and it can't fall down because then it would hit the plane but on the other hand it's never in contact with the plane. Art it's not.

Emotivism about art

Being largely tone-deaf, I don't appreciate music much at all. In fact, the older I get, the more music tends to annoy me, particularly when I meet it in the background of daily activities. I would much prefer listening to 4'33'' than to Mozart or Beethoven.

Yet I know that Mozart and Beethoven are much more beautiful music. Hence I embody a counterexample to emotivism about art. It is fun to be a counterexample (but I realize that it would be more fun to appreciate music, and I hope to do so in heaven).

Simplicity and beauty

Consider these two candidates for fundamental physical equations:

1. G=8πT
2. G=(8+π)T.

These two equations are equally simple. (The second has three extra characters in the above inscription. But that's just an artifact of the fact that we abbreviate "(8·π)" as "8π".) But the first equation is much more elegant. For it is elegant to multiply π by a power of two while it is inelegant to add a positive integer to π. The former just feels like a much natural expression.

There are other kinds of beauty of physical hypothesis that do not have much to do with simplicity. Sometimes, for instance, a given physical hypothesis can be characterized in two different ways: say, using a variational principle and a mechanistic story (Leibniz often talks about this). Physicists and mathematicians love this sort of thing. It definitely contributes to the felt beauty of the theory, and a theory that has such a dual characterization will, I think, be preferred to one that does not.

We like theories that tell a compelling story. There was something very compelling about Newton's idea that force is the rate of change of momentum and that the force of gravity drops off precisely in proportion to how "spread out" it is over a spherical shell at a given distance (i.e., the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the distance).

These are all aesthetic judgments, ones like those we employ when judging a piece of art or literature. "This really goes with that." "That's just a pointless plot twist."

This could lead us to non-realism about science. But I think it is better to see a tie between the physical world and our aesthetic judgments. It is, for instance, exactly the kind of tie we would expect if the world were the work of an artist whose tastes are not utterly alien to us.

Reproductions and forgeries

You can appreciate Monet's Woman with a Parasol in person through your own unaided vision. But perhaps you need eyeglasses. If you use eyeglasses while looking at the painting in the National Gallery, you're still appreciating Monet's painting. The same would be true if there were a window opposite the painting, and you were sitting in a tree and observing the painting through binoculars. Further, surely it makes no difference how the binoculars work. Ordinary binoculars work by rearranging light through lenses as it streams from the object to the eye. Digital binoculars, on the other hand, work by having sensors transform the light from the object and then creating images on tiny screens inside. When you look at Woman with a Parasol through digital binoculars, what you're appreciating is the painting through the binoculars, not the two tiny images on screens inside the binoculars.

But notice that with digital binoculars, you can do two things. You can look at the little screens inside or you can, as it were, look through them. The intentional objects are different: if you look at the screens, you see the screens; if you look through the screens, you see the world (including Woman with a Parasol, if that's where you're pointing the binoculars). When you look at the screens, your attention is at least in part on the pixels, the quality of the color rendition, the glare, and so on. When you look through the screens, your attention is on something out there in the world. The two experiences have distinctly different phenomenal feels, and you can go back and forth between them as in the case of the two duck-rabbit.

One more step. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, instead of cameras they have iconographs, which is a box with an imp that paints quickly with a little paintbrush. We can imagine binoculars made on that principle. A pair of eagle-eyed imps very quickly paint two little pictures in the box, constantly updating them. You could look through imp-binoculars at Woman with a Parasol, but we could also look at the pictures in the box, admiring the imps' workmanship. You could switch back and forth just by redirecting your attention. Note, however, that both ways of using the imp-binoculars could involve skill and knowledge. It might be that when you first look into the imp-binoculars, it's obvious to you that there are paintings inside (maybe you can see the brush strokes and the texture of the canvas) and only with experience do you learn to correlate the images in the imp-binoculars with the external world. On the other hand, if your visual acuity is not as good or if the imps are really good, you might not realize that there are paintings inside--it might feel like just looking through a pair of holes in a wall, and only with experience do you learn to see the images as little paintings.

At this point, it should be clear that one can look at a painting through its reproduction. It's just a matter of directing your attention and intentionality appropriately. It does, however, take knowledge. You need to know that the painting is a reproduction, just as you need to know that the imp-binoculars track the world to see the world through them.

This gives us an account of the properly aesthetic harm done by the forger of a particular painting (the forger of a particular painter's style is a more complicated case, but perhaps can be handled similarly). By blocking the viewer from knowing that the reproduction is a reproduction, the forger prevents the viewer from seeing the original through the forgery. It is the forgery rather than the original that is seen, but it is misconstrued. On the other hand, if the forger honestly informed us that this was a reproduction, she would be doing us a service--she would be providing us with a telescope pointed at the original.

What is interesting about this account of the properly aesthetic harms done by a forger is that it does not require us to value the viewing of an original over the viewing of a perfect reproduction. In fact, this account of what is bad about forgery depends precisely on the value of reproductions. One could--though one need not--hold that viewing Woman With a Parasol naked-eye, through eyeglasses, through optical binoculars, through digital binoculars, through imp-binoculars and through a reproduction are all equally valuable when the image quality is equal. In fact, viewing through a reproduction could be even more valuable, for instance if one's eyesight is poor and the reproduction is larger in size than the original. But it is important that we see the original through the reproduction, that the reproduction be a window on the artist's production, and indirectly on the artist's soul.

Likewise, we should see God through the world and especially through our neighbor.

Art, perceptual deployment and triviality

Works of art are designed to be observed through a particular perceptual apparatus deployed in a particular way. A music CD may be shiny and pretty to the eye, but this is orthogonal to the relevant aesthetic qualities which are meant to be experienced through the ear. A beautiful painting made for a trichromat human would be apt to look ugly to people with the five color pigments (including ultraviolet!) of a pigeon. A sculpture is meant to be observed with visible light, rather than x-rays, and a specific set of points of view are intended--for instance, most sculptures are meant to be looked at from the outside rather than the inside (the inside of a beautiful statue can be ugly). So when we evaluate the aesthetic qualities of a work of art, we evaluate a pair: "the object itself" and the set of intended deployments of perception. But "perception" here must be understood broadly enough to include language processing. The same sequence of sounds can be nonsense in one language, an exquisite metaphor in another, and trite in a third. And once we include language processing, it's hard to see where to stop in the degree of cognitive update to be specified in the set of deployments of perception (think, for instance, about the background knowledge needed to appreciate many works).

Furthermore, for every physical object, there is a possible deployment of a possible perceptual apparatus that decodes the object into something with the structure of the Mona Lisa or of War and Peace. We already pretty much have the technology to make smart goggles that turn water bottles in the visual field into copies of Michelangelo's David, and someone could make sculptures designed to be seen only through those goggles. (Indeed, the first exhibit could just be a single water bottle.) And if one insists that art must be viewable without mechanical aids--an implausible restriction--one could in principle genetically engineer a human who sees in such a way.

Thus any object could be beautiful, sublime or ugly, when paired with the right set of deployments of perceptual apparatus, including of cognitive faculties. This sounds very subjectivistic, but it's not. For the story is quite compatible with there being a non-trivial objective fact about which pairs of object and set of perceptual deployments exhibit which aesthetic qualities.

Still, the story does make for trivialization. I could draw a scribble on the board and then specify: "This scribble must be seen through a perceptual deployment that makes it into an intricate work of beautiful symmetry." On the above view, I will have created a beautiful work of art relative to the intended perceptual deployments. But I will have outsourced all of the creative burden onto the viewer who will need to, say, design distorting lenses that give rise to a beautiful symmetry when trained on the scribble. That's like marketing a pair of chopsticks as a device that is guaranteed to rid one's home of mosquitoes if the directions are followed, where the directions say: "Catch mosquito with chopsticks, squish, repeat until done." One just isn't being helpful.

Bad movies

Some films are evil. Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will, say. My interest in this post is not in such morally harmful films. Rather, I am interested in bad movies in the sense of trashy or kitschy movies, but which are nonetheless not evil. Star Wars Episodes I-III are examples.

One might say that the films that I am interested in are ones that are bad artistically, unlike Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will which promote evil ideas by what is in a narrow sense of the term "good art".

Now if I were to spend the rest of my life on a desert island with a solar powered DVD player, I'd rather have Star Wars I-III (or any one of them) than no movies. (On the other hand, I would rather not have Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will, because I'd be afraid that out of boredom I would watch them enough times that the propaganda might eventually start sinking in.) And I think that not only would I be less bored, but I would actually be better off qua film viewer, better off qua being with artistic sensibilities, for watching these films on the island. Despite the fact that I would call these films bad, nonetheless I think they are better than nothing, even qua films. That probably wouldn't be true of all films.

So I think that some of the things we call bad movies are nonetheless better than nothing. They are really, thus, on balance good things, and even on balance good qua films. They are simply bad compared to the better ones, and hence bad compared to our expectations. The point generalizes. Much of what we call bad literature, bad music, bad painting and so on is, nonetheless, on balance good. Qua consumers of the art, we are better off with it than with nothing. Much but probably not all. I don't want to deny that there is literature, music and paintings that it would be better not to witness, simply on aesthetic grounds, but I suspect we greatly exaggerate the quantity of it. In the interests of not being whiny, of appropriate gratitude and optimism, I suggest the more accurate word "mediocre" in place of "bad" when we're not dealing with stuff that's worse artistically than nothing.

Lifelikeness of fractals

It's well-known that fractal-type objects can be quite lifelike and easy to generate. I've been scripting Minecraft with Python, in preparation for teaching this to gifted middle- and high-schoolers this summer, and wrote a simple 3D turtle graphics class with pitch/yaw/roll support. Like many kids of my generation, I did 2D turtle graphics programming with LOGO in school, but a 3D turtle just has a load of new possibilities. In particular, the 3D turtle allows for nice 3D fractal generation.

Instructions on how to do this stuff in Minecraft are in my Python coding for Minecraft instructable.

It was very easy to generate the following fairly lifelike tree with a simple bit of recursive code and some randomness.

An L-system does a pretty lifelike job even without randomness (using rules from geeky.blogger):

There is something glorious about a world where structures are mirrored on multiple levels. It makes the different parts and levels of the world be like a work of art, with themes and intertextuality.

Limitations, art and evil

It's a standard thought that art thrives on limitations. These may be imposed by the technical capacities of the medium (I was reading this today) or by repressive authorities (think here of communist-era Eastern European literature), or they may be limitations imposed by the artist or her artistic community. In this regard art is like sport, where there are rules that constrain one from what might otherwise be thought of as efficient ways to achieve the goal, such as using a car to "run" a marathon.

Let's not think of God as setting out to create the best possible work of art. The idea of a best possible work of art divorced from model on which God "first" institutes for himself a set of limitations which both constrain and constitutively make possible a particular kind of artistic achievement, and "then" tries to produce the best work within those limitations. For instance, among these limitations there might be a small number of laws of nature and of fundamental kinds of things (compare pixel artists who limit their palette), perhaps with a limited number of self-allowed deviations from the laws. But in addition to such "technical" restrictions, there might be restrictions coming from the content of an artistic vision: what kind of thing it is that God is trying to say in the work.

If we have this sort of a model, then two things happen. The first is that the worry that a perfect being couldn't create since there is no best of all possible worlds disappears. For it is not so hard to think that within certain genre constraints there could be an optimal work (after all, some genre constraints may constrain a work to a finite size; see also this).

The second is that some progress is made on the problem of evil--though by no means is this a solution. For we can answer some "Why did God not do it this way instead?" questions by pointing to the self-imposed artistic limitations. Nonetheless, caution is required. One is very uncomfortable with the thought of God allowing horrendous undeserved suffering for art's sake. Though maybe if the sufferers eventually fully appreciate the art...?

Novels and worlds

As the length increases, the possibilities for good novels initially increase. It may not be possible to write a superb novel significantly shorter than One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But eventually the possibilities for good novels start to decrease, because the length itself becomes an aesthetic liability. While one could easily have a series of novels that total ten million words, a single novel of ten million words just wouldn't be such a good novel. Indeed, it seems plausible that there is no possible novel of ten million words (in a language like human languages) that's better than War and Peace or One Day or The Lord of the Rings.

If this is right, then there are possible English-language novels with the property that they could not be improved on. For there are only finitely many possible English-language novels of length below ten million, and any novel above that length will be outranked qua novel by some novel of modest length, say War and Peace or One Day.[note 1]

So, there are possible unimprovable English-language novels. Are there possible unimprovable worlds? Or is it the case that we can always improve any possible world, say by adding one more happy angelic mathematician? In the case of novels, we were stipulating a particular kind of artistic production: a novel. Within that artistic production, past a certain point length becomes a defect. But is an analogue true with worlds?

One aspect of the question is this: Is it the case that past a certain point the number of entities, say, becomes a defect? Maybe. Let's think a bit why super-long novels aren't likely to be that great. They either contain lots of different kinds of material or they are repetitive. In the latter case, they're not that great artistically. But if they contain lots of different kinds of material, then they lose the artistic unity that's important to a novel.

Could the same thing be true of worlds? Just adding more and more happy angels past a certain point will make a world repetitive, and hence not better. (Maybe not worse either.) But adding whole new kinds of beings might damage the artistic unity of the world.

Art as discovery and mathematics as art

There is a very large but probably finite number of possible images that the human eye can distinguish. Among these possible images, it seems that a relatively small subset is very beautiful (or has some other aesthetic quality to a high degree—I'll just stick to beauty for now). One way to see that visual artist is as a discoverer and communicator of beautiful images: in that very large finite space of possible images, she discovers a beautiful one, and then realizes it. The realization makes it possible for her to communicate her discovery to others. (Of course, the tools of discovery will often not be entirely mental—paintbrushes, texture of canvas, and the like all are tools of discovery, like a scientist's instruments or a mathematician's calculator or scrap paper.) Likewise, the musician searches the very large but probably finite number of possible sequences of sounds that the human ear can distinguish for that small minority that are very beautiful, and realizing the possible sequence communicates her discovery to others.

This model of the artist as discoverer and communicator makes the artist not that different from the pure mathematician, who also searches a large space of abstracta—say, the space of proofs or the space of theorems—for the few that exhibit some property, often an aesthetic one such as beauty (mathematicians also talk of "interest", but when the mathematics is pure, that "interest" is a kind of aesthetic quality, and for simplicity I'll stick to beauty) and then communicates these to others.

How exactly the analogy between the artist and the mathematician works out depends on whether Platonism about propositions (and similar objects) is true. The musician and painter in producing sounds and paintings do not merely represent the beauty of the possible sound or image: they make the possible sound or image actual. If such Platonism is true, then the mathematician does not realize possibilia in presenting a proof or a theorem, but only represents them. In this way, the mathematician is more like a composer or a novelist whose product is also a representation of a thing of beauty, rather than the thing of beauty itself. (Of course, the inscription of a theorem or a musical composition can be beautiful—the the quality of the calligraphy, say, but this is not mathematical or musical artistry per se.) On the other hand, if Platonism is false, then we might think of the very token inscriptions of a theorem or a proof as realizations of the possibilia that the mathematician has discovered: the mathematician searches the space of possible theorem inscriptions and finds beautiful ones.

Of course the discovery model of the artist's work isn't the only model of the artist's work. I think a creation model is more common. This model lays an emphasis on producing a thing of beauty (or other aesthetic qualities, of course). But I think that the discovery model works particularly well for a composer, who can be a great composer upon composing a beautiful work even if no one performs it.

The creation model makes the artist more like God. Is that a merit or demerit of the model?

But remember I am no philosopher of art.