The science of art
“Is art only about pleasing or displeasing?” was the big question posed in the second set of lectures as part of this year’s Symposium: A Matter of Opinion, which was hosted yesterday at the Student Center.
Christopher Klütsch and Zoran Belic, art history and graphic design professors respectively, presented their thoughts on how today’s society regards art and the methods people use for viewing it.
Klütsch, Skyping in from SCAD Lacoste, began the event with his keynote presentation titled “Information Aesthetics and a Mathematical Description of Aesthetic Values.” Intimidating at first, after a while the lecture eased into an exploration of computer art in the mid-1960s where software programs produced work that looked very much like abstract, perhaps even Cubist, art.
This in turn sparked the discussion of whether or not there was in fact a way to logically determine what makes art successful. Klütsch cited several different intellectuals to support his claims, including American mathematician David G. Birkhoff and German philosopher and writer Max Bense. Birkhoff, who studied how the relationship of order and complexity determined aesthetic measurement, wrote an entire book on the subject titled “Aesthetic Measure.” And in the 1960s, Bense and his colleagues wrote their “Manifesto for Concrete Poetry” to look at how language transforms into meaning to create technological precision.
After his segment, an audience member asked whether the speakers thought computer programs could ever replace artists. Klütsch replied by saying that “subject evaluation is what defines us from humans and separates us from computers.” Thus the idea that innovation can only come from humanity was the perfect transition into Belic’s lecture “Semiological-Axiological Discourse.”
In the second half of the event, Belic focused on the visual sense, stating that “the human mind is always structured [and] imposes all processing into specific sensorial relationships.” He opened the discussion on how aesthetic principles do not actually exist as these are really just concepts that the human world has constructed. His remarks posed the question, Is what we consider beautiful just pre-conceived?
The session ended with a round table discussion between the two speakers and the audience. The strongest idea brought forth was one that focused on how aesthetic pleasure is experienced primarily at the moment when a viewer initially sees a piece of art. The image is only a “tool that brings us to something else.”
Viewers left the talk realizing that perhaps beautiful art is not always successful; and though there are ways to measure the aesthetic value of art, which computers can logically recreate themselves, without human artists no new artistic voices will ever be heard.
Gabby Manotoc has been Creative Director for District for the past three years. She also designs the Port City Review, the student produced and curated annual literary arts journal of SCAD.
