Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist. The aesthetic features of art make sense mainly as displays of the artist’s skill and creativity, not as vehicles of transcendental enlightenment, religious inspiration, social commentary, psycho-analytic revelation, or political revolution. Plato and Hegel derogated art for failing to deliver the same sort of truth that they thought philosophy could produce. They misunderstood the point of art. It is unfair to expect a medium that evolved to display biological fitness to be well adapted for communicating abstract philosophical truths.

This fitness indicator theory helps us to understand why “art” is an honorific term that connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement. When mathematicians talk about the “art” of theorem-proving, they are recognizing that good theorems are often beautiful theorems, and beautiful theorems are often products of minds with high fitness. It is a claim for the social and sexual status of their favorite display medium. Likewise for the “arts” of warfare, chess, football, cooking, gardening, teaching, and sex itself. In each case, art implies that application of skill beyond the pragmatically necessary. Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not art. A claim that one’s work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.

Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

The following quote needs an explanation, a preface. Ex-Soviet emigrees Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are know in art world as visual provocateurs who keep teasing audiences with unsettling artwork at its most satirical, statistical, and commercial extremes. One of their projects was a statistical poll to find out what kind of painting is preferred by average people intending to discover what a true “people’s art” should look like. The result of a professional market research survey was stunning: people from all over the world, from United States to Ukraine, from Iceland to Kenya – they all like a blue landscape. It is a “realistic-looking” dishwasher-size painting depicting an outdoor scene with water (lakes, rivers or seas), clear blue or stormy skies, vibrant blended colors, preferably a fall scene with wild animals (Finland prefers moose and Kenya prefers hippopotamus) and famous or ordinary people at leisure. It is hilarious. It is quintessential kitsch. But people have spoken. That’s what they want.

Excerpt from “Blue Landscapes, Bewitching Numbers, and the Double Life of Jokes: An Interview with Komar and Mealmid”

QUESTION: So what you make of the fact that the people have spoken for the blue landscape?

VITALY KOMAR: I believe it reflects people’s nostalgia about freedom. It’s very simple metaphor, and very deep at the same time: closed space and open space. The connection of idea of closed space, I believe, it’s prison. And concentration of idea of open space is a landscape – air, no barriers, in other words, vacation, freedom.

You know, we are not free. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose to inhabit this world, this space, this giant room, or, in language of contemporary art, this installation. But if, initially, life was not act of free will, then freedom does not exist in principle, much less in day-to-day life. In search of freedom, of blue landscape, we can at any time open the big door that leads out of this room, out of this time and space, out of this world and this life. But most of us are not capable of suicide; we are afraid to find out maybe behind this door there is another installation, another, different colored landscape. So most of us do not choose to leave this room. Most of us wait for door to open by itself – another, maybe final, violation of our will. Meanwhile, we look for smaller freedoms, open smaller doors, which are so numerous in this installation they resemble some labyrinth of modern offices.

You know, life reminds me of office. Employees scribble abstract patterns in legal pads during meetings and leave office during lunch. Within greater enslavement we discover small freedom – so we think. But if we examine close, this freedom turns out to be a new slavery, with its own freedom/slavery, and so on: our choice of lunch, for example, its price, taste, nutrients, etc.

A concentric structure like Russian matryoshka doll emerges, and we can track this structure down to its smallest particles, to indivisible moments of orgasm and pain, pleasure and suffering. Next installation “People’s Choice” will be like labyrinth of computerized offices. Only question is how to design the “big door” without going to extremes of Freudian interpretation.

QUESTION: All that in a blue landscape.

ALEXANDER MELAMID: It might seem like something funny, but you know, I’m thinking that this blue landscape is more serious than we first believed. Talking to people in the focus groups before we did the poll and the town hall meetings around the country after, I think people want to talk about art, for better or for worse, and they talk for hours and hours. It’s hard to stop them; nobody ever asks them about art. But almost everyone you talk directly – and we’ve already talked to hundreds of people – they have this blue landscape in their head. It sits there, and it’s not a joke. They can see it, down to smallest detail. So I’m wondering, maybe the blue landscape is genetically imprinted in us, that it’s the paradise within, that we came from blue landscape and we want it. Maybe paradise is not something which is awaiting us; it is already inside of us, and the point is how to figure it out, how to discover it, how to get it out.

We now completed polls in many countries – China, Kenya, Iceland, and so on and the results are strikingly similar. Can you believe it? Kenya and Iceland – what can be more different in the whole fucking world? – and they both want blue landscape. So we think that we hit on something here. A dream of modernism, you know, is to find a universal art. People believe that the square was what could unite people, that it is really, truly universal. But they were wrong. The blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind.

QUESTION: Paradise: pro or con? Let’s go back to what you said earlier about paradise and the blue landscape. Going up the Hudson River the other day I thought perhaps the blue landscape is the last pure idealization, because with nature, in the instant of contemplation, you can forget that the water is polluted, the air is polluted, that on each side of the river is a strip mall or a faded town or whatever. In the moment of observation, all of that is forgotten, which is something you can’t say when you look at cities and factories, or when you think of communism or of the old idea of progress through electricity all motifs of modernism in one way or another. So maybe when people say they want a blue landscape it’s as a kind of icon of purer reality, the last remnant of faith.

VITALY KOMAR: But you are mixing beauty in reality and beauty in art. They are two different kinds of beauty, two different kinds of aesthetics in art and in life. For example, socialist realism asked artists to represent reality, but it was false reality. Because the basic idea of socialist realism was to depict people as they might be, not as they are. Because we are building ideal society, so we need ideal people. Of course, it was not realism at all, because real people were polluted, real life was polluted. And when people are speaking of blue landscape, I’m afraid they mean real landscape, not painting. They just like to have a reflection of reality in their everyday life; in their apartments they imagine this picture as a window of their freedom. It captures experience of hermits, who go out into desert and so forth. The blue landscape can make people hermits for a second, to meditate. Making people hermits for a second maybe that is the basic idea of art.

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art

The history of mankind in the last three hundred years has been punctuated by major upheavals in human thought that we call scientific revolutions – upheavals that have profoundly affected the way in which we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First there was the Copernican revolution – the notion that far from being the center of the universe, our planet is a mere speck of dust revolving around the sun. Then there was the Darwinian revolution, culminating in the view that we are not angles but merely hairless apes, as Thomas Henry Huxley once pointed out. And, third, there was Freud’s discovery of the “unconscious” – the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behavior is governed by cauldron of motives and emotions of which we are barely conscious. You conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

V. S. Ramachandran
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers

I am not a very big movie fan. In fact I have never been to a movie theater since I cannot bear the smell of popcorn. Instead I have a small DVD collection of my favorite movies. I guess the definition of a good movie for me is the one which you can watch numerous times and every time you discover something new. Not very often I come across such movies. I believe I found another one. It is “Everything is Illuminated” directed by Liev Schreiber. I won’t tell you what this movie is about. You have to watch it. There is a website devoted to this film which I highly recommend as well – www.WhoIsAugustine.com.

It is not for everyone. First of all it is an independent movie, not a mainstream Hollywood. And only those who speak Russian can fully understand and appreciate it. There are a lot Russian conversation in this movie which is translated with subtitles but obviously they are far off.

The actors are brilliant. The main part is played by famous Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and many others). It is a debut for Eugene Hutz and he is incredible. He is better known as the singer, lyricist and visionary of the critically acclaimed gypsy punk rock band “Gogol Bordello“. Boris Leskin (Falcon and the Snowman, Men In Black and others) acted in over forty Russian films before immigrating to the United States where he made a carrier from a taxi cab driver to a Professor of Acting at New York University.

The film is an adaptation of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel “Everything is Illuminated“. The novel takes its title from a quote in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” The passage refers to the philosophical idea that the greatest tragedies in life can only be experienced to their fullest if we are able to relive them.

To make sure that we survive in a dangerous world dominated by scarcity, our genes have programmed us to be greedy, to want power, to dominate over others. For the same reason, the social group into which we are born teaches us that only those who share our language and religion are to be trusted. The inertia of the past dictates that most of our goals will be shaped by genetic or by cultural inheritance. It is these goals, the Buddhists tell us, that we must learn to curb. But this aim requires very strong motivation. Paradoxically, the goal of rejecting programmed goals might require the constant investment of all one’s psychic energy. A Yogi or a Buddhist monk needs every ounce of attention to keep programmed desires from irrupting into consciousness, and thus have little physic energy left free to do anything else.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos has been photographed many, many times. The most famous photograph is by Ansel Adams showing the back of the church. It gives an impression, at least for me when I first saw it, that it positioned in a vast empty space like many Italian churches placed in front of big piazzas. In fact Ranchos de Taos church is very intimate: there is a very small plaza with crumbled pavement in front of the church. It is surrounded by small shops and houses. La Fiesta Saloon is claiming the other side of the plaza. Church is not alone, it does not sand out, it is part of the community. The place is quintessential New Mexico. With a touch of Italy.

When I first came to the plaza at daytime a small children’s choir was rehearsing inside the church. The sweet sound of their voices was spilling into the fresh winter air. The plaza was empty and I spent about two hours not only making photographs but just walking around and drinking Taos crisp cold air like chilly wine. I came back again after sunset. And again nobody was around, just me. The church was illuminated with floodlights and I caught a moment when luminosity of the church and the sky was the same and made almost the same composition several hours ago in daylight. Sweet memories…

[Art] is one of those terms that everyone believes he or she understands – until asked to define them. All too readily people assume that “art”, as they understand the term, is a universal phenomenon, and they tend to ascribe not only the word itself but also all its connotations to non-Western contexts. As a result, we have come to think of “the artist” as a special kind of person who, because of some universal, almost mystical, principle of inspiration, is found in all societies. But notions of “art” and “artists” are formulations that are made at specific points in history and in specific cultures. For instance, “art” as we think of it in present-day London, new York or Paris, did not exist in Middle Ages, when people did not distinguish between “artisan” and “artist”. The notion of inspired individuals who, by their almost spiritual status, are set apart from ordinary mortals is a concept that gained acceptance in more recent West during Romantic Movement (c. 1770-1848), a period when writers and philosophers asserted the ascendancy of individual experience and a sense of transcendental.

… the making of art is social, not purely personal, activity. Art serves social purposes, though it is manipulated by individual people in social context to achieve certain ends. Art cannot be understood outside its social context.

David Lewis-Williams
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

I have to admit that I’m a big fan of Star Trek. Not the original Star Trek and not the latest series, but one and the only one – Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the episodes features Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, and Dathon of the alien Tamarian race, played by Paul Winfield. Captain Picard is captured and then trapped on a planet together with Tamarian captain. They must learn to communicate with each other before the beast of the planet overwhelms them. The Tamarian language, although “translated” by universal translator device, is still unintelligible for Picard, because it is too deeply rooted in local Tamarian metaphors. Eventually Jean-Luc grasps the meaning of Tamarian metaphors and in the end he even enriched them with metaphors from Saga of Gilgamesh.

Enthusiastic Star Trek fans compiled the Damrok Dictionary which has Tamarian phrases like these:

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
dahr-MOCK juh-LAHD tuh-NAH-gruh
Friendship as a result of shared struggle

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh
kuh-DEER moe-moe-TAY
Failure

Mirab, his sails unfurled
mee-RAHB
Departure, “let’s go”

Sokath, his eyes open
soh-KAHTH
Realization, understanding, an epiphany

Temba, his arms wide
TEM-buh
Giving, receiving

I’m telling this story because I think that photography like Tamarian Dathon speaks metaphorical language quite frequently. Every photographic image has to be interpreted in context of culture, religion, history, in context of personal life of the photographer, his relationship with nature and people in his life. Every photograph carries a metaphor. Every photograph is a metaphor. Metaphors could be quite potent but often utterly meaningless to a viewer. In that case photograph fails its main function – to communicate (Kadir beneath Mo Moteh). Question: is it a failure of a photographer or a viewer? Or both? Photographer must try to understand the language of the viewer and vise versa. Photographer should try to speak universal language of art showing a path to his cultural or personal metaphors. And viewer should be visually educated, be ready to accept the path. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I am very certain that many, many people have awakened in the middle of the night with a flash of inspiration about some novel they would like to write, or a play or poem or whatever and that most of these inspirations never come to anything. Inspirations are dime to dozen. The difference between the inspiration and the final product is an awful lot of hard work, an awful lot of discipline, an awful lot of training, an awful lot of finger exercises and practices and rehearsals and throwing away of the first draft and so on.

Abraham H. Maslow

In one of our travels to Tuscany in Italy we stayed for several days in a small village called Lucignano d’Asso. It is hardly a village, it is just a few medieval houses perched on a top of the hill. The whole place is owned by one woman, baroness. She met and greeted us when we arrived late night. The next morning we discovered how beautiful that place was. It was early April, out of tourist season and the village was virtually empty. We had it all to ourselves. We had plans to drive around the country, to Pienza and Bagno Vignoni but instead we stayed and simply soaked the beauty around us. Outside the house there was a patch all covered in flowers. I spent almost an hour crawling around and making pictures. This is a vertical panorama I made from 5 frames. I used 60mm macro lens and changed the focus for every subsequent frame to make the whole panorama tack sharp from bottom to top. There are two different perceptions of this panorama made as a large print: you can look at it from a distance and enjoy the colors and texture and it is totally different from up close when you immerse yourself into life-size colorful flowers.