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Abstract
The project of neuroaesthetics could be interpreted as an attempt to identify a “neural essence” of art, i.e., a set of necessary and sufficient conditions formulated in the language of neuroscience, which define the concept art . Some proposals developed within this field can be read in this way. I shall argue that such attempts do not succeed in individuating a neural definition of art. Of course, the fact that the proposals available for defining art in neural terms do not work does not mean that such an enterprise is in principle doomed to failure. However, I maintain that there are good reasons to suspect that in general such a definition cannot be worked out. This does not mean, though, that the study of neural correlates in artwork production and fruition is a senseless project. Neuroaesthetics could succeed in individuating widespread mechanisms common to different forms of art coming from remote cultural contexts, which presumably rely on aspects of our mind and/or brain's functioning that are innate and biologically determined, thus contrasting the idea that artistic phenomena are entirely dependent on cultural factors.
Acknowledgements
I thank Roberto Cordeschi and Filippo Fimiani for reading previous versions of this paper, and for their useful comments.
Notes
[1] See Warburton (Citation2003) for a recent version of it.
[2] I only observe here that it is not strange that the concept art cannot be defined in classical terms, since this is the case for the majority of common sense concepts, as it results from many influential philosophical analyses and from almost forty years of empirical psychological research (see Margolis & Laurence, Citation1999, for a collection of classical papers on this topic, and Murphy, 2002, for a rich survey of the psychological research on concepts). Within the context of ordinary discourse, (lexical) concepts that can be characterised according to the criteria of classical theory are rare. The majority of them do not allow a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. It is not clear why art should be an exception from this point of view.
[3] For a discussion, see chapters 4 and 5 of Warburton (Citation2003).
[4] In what follows I am primarily concerned with the neuro-scientific study of responses to artworks. However, it must be remembered that neuroaesthetics is not limited to this: more generally, it is the study of the neural correlates of taste and of reactions to beauty. A further terminological caveat is that the term aesthetics is not used only in the sense of a theory of art or of taste, but also to refer to a general theory of experience (on this point, see also the following footnote 5).
[5] From the “Statement on neuroaesthetics,” in Zeki's website on neuroaesthetics. The idea of the artist as a neuroscientist is akin to a thesis by Cavanagh (Citation2005). It could be objected that this is concerned more with aesthetics intended as a general theory of experience, rather than with aesthetics in the sense of a theory of art. However, I think that Zeki's claim is that these aspects are relevant in a specific sense for the functioning of many artworks. In general, I suspect that the functioning of many artworks as artworks rests on mechanisms that are not specifically aesthetic (in the sense of specifically pertaining to art). Consider an example from Cavanagh (Citation2005). Neuroimaging experiments showed that blurry depictions of human faces strongly activate the amygdala, a brain center involved in the processing of emotions. Cavanagh suggests that this has to do with the effect of many impressionist paintings. Maybe this could also help to explain that “pathetic” effect of the “soft” figures produced by such different artists as Correggio, Tranquillo Cremona, Medardo Rosso, or Eugène Carrière. This is an example of a result of aesthetics intended as a theory of experience that could be relevant also for aesthetics in the sense of a theory of art. I shall return on these points later in the article, namely in footnote 13 and in the last two paragraphs of section 3.
[6] The opposition between “exhibited features” and “relational attributes” can be found in Mandelbaum (Citation1965, p. 222). It could be observed that exhibited properties also are in some sense relational, because they rest on the relation between an observed object and some observer. We can hypothesise that, when Mandelbaum speaks of “relational attributes,” he means “relational not exhibited attributes.” In any case, this is not essential for our present purposes.
[7] It must be noted that they only take visual arts into account.
[8] The ten laws stated in Ramachandran (Citation2002) are: (1) Peak shift, (2) Grouping, (3) Contrast, (4) Isolation, (5) Perceptual problem solving, (6) Symmetry, (7) Abhorrence of coincidences/generic viewpoint, (8) Repetition, rhythm and orderliness, (9) Balance, and (10) Metaphor.
[9] The laws fail to individuate sufficient conditions for being an artwork: it is obvious that, taken singularly, any one of the laws is not a sufficient condition; and it is very unlikely that even their conjunction could be sufficient for something to be a work of art.
[10] Not to mention the fact that Ramachandran and Hirstein promptly dismiss ready-mades and analogous phenomena in contemporary art: “Notwithstanding the Dada movement, we can then ask, Is there a common pattern underlying these apparently dissimilar attributes…” (ibid., p. 16, emphasis added).
[11] A similar “definition” of art, expressed in terms of a list of features (twelve in this case), is proposed by Dutton (Citation2009). Dutton's proposal is naturalistic in spirit, but it is formulated in evolutionary rather than neuroscientific terms. Also in this case, however (even leaving aside, again, the vagueness of many items on the list), we are not dealing with a true definition providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept art. Rather, it is a list of typical features that most artworks satisfy. It is worth noting that Dutton, like Ramachandran and Hirstein, prefers to leave out ready-mades and similar works from his considerations on art (see chapter 8 of his 2009, about Dadaism).
[12] For example, from this definition the paradoxical conclusion follows that photographic plates of any technical manual turn out to be more “artistic” than, say, “abstract” photographs by Mario Giacomelli or Franco Fontana.
[13] “Visual art is largely, though not exclusively, the product of the activity of the visual brain” (Zeki, Citation1999, p. 8). It could be objected that it is obvious that observing paintings involves the activity of the visual brain. And surely it is. But, in my opinion, Zeki's claim is more specific: there are works of visual art that seem to be devised in such a way as to “draw the attention” of the observer to some particular aspect of visual processing, and in this consists most of their aesthetic justification. For example, every picture obviously activates the area V1 of the visual cortex, but Mondrian's plus-minus compositions seem to be designed to specifically stimulate it. Something similar has already been observed by David Marr (Citation1982). In a passage of the conversation that concludes his book on vision, he observes that some artists concentrate on (and sometimes disrupt) certain preferred levels of visual representation: “the pointillists, for example, are tampering primarily with the image” (Marr, Citation1982, p. 356), Cezanne is more specifically interested in the representation of surfaces, and so on.
[14] Of course, I do not deny that the representation of “constant, lasting, essential and enduring features of objects, surfaces, faces, situations and so on” plays a crucial role in countless works of visual art, both traditional and (more or less) experimental. I do deny that this allows us to define visual art; that this is its essence.
[15] See also the answer by Gallese and Freedberg (Citation2007) to this objection.
[16] For a less “baroque” aesthetic use of similar subject matter in photography, see the series entitled The Morgue, by the photographer Andres Serrano (see, e.g., Hanson, Citation2004).
[17] As suggested by Oriane de Guermantes with regard to Frans Hals’ portraits in Haarlem in (Proust, Citation1920).
[18] In other words, here we see what Weitz (Citation1956) had already individuated as a problem for traditional theories of art.
[19] And it is also at odds with the thesis of a purely conventional and institutional nature of art, as maintained by Dickie for example. On this point see also Gallese and Freedberg (2007).
[20] Shiner concedes at most that we could find “scattered similarities” between past practices and the modern conception of art (2001, p. 17). I object since, in spite of the deep differences between distant historical and social conceptions of what art is, there must be also strong elements of continuity, which are likely to be partially rooted in our psychological (and neural) nature, and which make our fruition of artworks of the past not a purely bookish or archaeological matter. Shiner does not specifically consider the problem of biological constants of art (but in the preface to the 2010 Italian translation, he claims that today he should devote greater attention to such aspects).
[21] At least in certain “cultivated” circles: there are lots of people that still weep when exposed to aesthetic artefacts, such as novels, songs, movies or soap operas.
[22] It is likely, however, that Dutton adopts the expression “art instinct” in a rather metaphorical way, without hypothesizing the existence of a specific mental faculty for art in the strict sense. He claims for example that “the art instinct proper is not a single genetically driven impulse…but a complicated ensemble of impulses” (Dutton, Citation2009, p. 6), and that “our aesthetic tastes … look … like a haphazard concatenation of adaptations, extensions of adaptations, and vestigial attraction and preferences” (Dutton, Citation2009, p. 219).