Art and Globalization

Modern artists had always positioned themselves as honest persons, indeed the single artist present itself as the only honest person in a world of hypocrisy and corruption. It is important to investigate how the production of trust and sincerity has functioned in modern times in order to elucidate the way it functions today.

The current idea of “global art” is set along the lines of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s—the McDonaldization of the world. Given the experiences of the past, the West knows that, on one hand, these words are only to give them comfort, and, on the other hand, it is certain that the artists of many countries do not have sufficient knowledge and the means of entry to their domain. If with great difficulty, one or two of them do arrive with a pat or two on the back, they can be absorbed within their [Western] culture.

Besides under certain circumstances, blending cultures might be beneficial, but its disadvantages are obvious. The blending of cultures can only occur between two or a few cultures which are similar, presented to the world in a compatible and harmonious manner. A commanding, dominant culture does not blend well with a dependent, imitating culture. Rather, the former devours the latter.

History has demonstrated that whenever two or a few cultures have faced each other, be it in a peaceful, coexisting manner, or in a conflicting manner, new experiences occur; we call them “multi-cultural” experiences. Today, cultures are expected to resist being devoured by dominating cultures by focusing on their own special features. The efforts of the West are aimed at presenting the art of other peoples as the “symbol of collective identities” while ignoring the individual identities of “others,” that same individuality upon which Western art established itself and through which it attained an identity.

Nowadays art is becoming like any other commodity or product exported and imported worldwide. Small artists can take advantage of a larger platform to sell their works and if they succeed they they have the possibility to reach anyone, anywhere in the world.

Does the evolution of a new hybrid language and the globalization of English provide insights into trends in contemporary art? Will local creativity and regional distinctions be lost in the rush to a common global culture? Or will cultural hybridization and international cultural exchange add strength and help to increase creative expansion?

Comments about Art and Science

We are not humans having a spiritual experience,
we are spirits having a human experience.
Pierre Chardin

Science

1. Ignorance is bliss.
   
2. Knowledge, "...can't get no satisfaction!"

1. About the tea party...Quantum physics teaches us that there's no good reason, or law, that stops the pouring tea from going up. And the broken egg can mend itself. Yeah, right.

1. Define everything that a human being is in truth (not honesty) and all the other answers are verifiable through standard theorem, test and prove procedures.
2. Until one understands the totality of "human" then no explanation to the question is possible because all of the components of the equation are not included.

1. I can't see the forest because I am a tree. So when I fell, I fell in backwards. Heaven is within. Only Time will tell if I made a sound when I landed. Assume I did. I made a big bang, and a choir of angels roared in my behalf.

Science and Art

1. I believe poetry is a more accurate description of the world than science because time is not linear. Science is based on linear causality across time, prose like this is linear. Time is not linear and poetry is how language escapes linearity.

1. Numbers are a means to an end, art is an end in itself, it is meaning.

1. i know...
2. but it's not enough, i know
3. i love...and it's not little, you know
4. 
   
5. i'm standing on a dot
6. but i can see
7. infinity
8. and
9. beyond
   

1. I believe art is also crucial for the well being of the brain. We have evolved over time from periods of intense physical activity, where the body was exercised continuously just to find and capture food, to leading sedentary lives. Thus,the effect of no exercise on the body can be clearly seen. As the body gets less exercise, the brain takes a more prominent role, 'thinking' instead of physically 'doing'.
2. Art can occupy the brain when it needs its own exercise, when it isn't taking care of the physical aspects of the body's operation.
3. Art is an outlet for the mind, as physical exertion is an outlet for pent up aggression.

Art

1. I think that art might replace the playing activity kids do everyday and grown ups stop doing, Art has pretty similar characteristics to playing, it is exploratory, it is fun, it involves discovering, it involves learning and creating, and so on.

1. ...beauty isn't strictly located in the brain..." well, the brain isn't strictly beautiful, either.

1. There is no doubt that perception allows people to connect, and that I believe is our true nature.
2. We are all connected in a sense yet granted the gift of our unique perceptions.

1. Have you considered that the universe itself might be sentient and that the laws of physics are merely universal thought patterns? In this view, would reality be changeable or plastic as defined by universal thought?

Artists


Val, Walking man, Uncle Tree, Scribulus, Squires, Stu, Human Being, Rick

Art and the brain according to Zeki

A work of art is a product of the brain, a work of literature is a product of the brain and one can learn a great deal about the limits and the possibilities of brain organisation by looking at these works. Professor Zeki thinks that neuroscientist have anything to teach the humanist or the artist, that Cezanne's drawing would improve by knowing how the brain works. Implying that neurscoientist have a great deal to learn from artist, but don't have that much to teach them.

One of the primordial functions of the brain is to acquire knowledge, but the making of sense of this world; of the impulses that we are getting all day long which are often in a chaotic state, is a primordial function of the brain. Let us say portrait painting, a great portrait is one which gives you knowledge of a certain character, of certain characteristics of that character, and hence becomes applicable not to just one person but applicable to many characters of that time. For example you could paint arrogance, or resigned resentment, in the late self portrait of Rembrandt there is this resigned resentment at failing powers, and this is applicable to many people. It is knowledge about the character that it gives you.

The characteristic of an efficient knowledge-acquiring system, faced with permanent change, is its capacity to abstract, to emphasize the general at the expense of the particular. Abstraction, which arguably is a characteristic of every one of the many different visual areas of the brain, frees the brain from enslavement to the particular and from the imperfections of the memory system.

An interesting thing Lichenstein said is that science is often considered to be for learning whereas art is for pleasure. And people don't realise that you learn a great deal from art as well. If you want to learn something about human nature, let us say about arrogance, would you be better off reading Corielanus by Shakespeare or studying textbooks of psychology? Probably you would benefit from both, enormously.

One way of looking at art history, in Zeki’s terms, is as the progression of the human brain’s understanding of its own capacity for visual perception. You can see this in artists work "When an artist says: ‘How can I make a great portrait?’" Zeki observes, "what they really mean is ‘how can I represent this particular face on canvas so that it allows the brain to generalize its concept of faces and therefore becomes a great portrait?’" This desire can be tested experimentally; some cells in the brain will only "fire" with excitement when presented with particular views of the face. The greatest portrait painters have, through experiment, intuition, and skill, discovered the rules of this visual grammar.

When we study, the capacity to evaluate something that's beautiful, you are actually interacting with the work of art. and you're deciding whether it's nice or not. Zeki emphasizes that they haven't located beauty, which is another common misapprehension, they just located the neural activity that corresponds with the appreciation of particular works of art. Meaning that beauty isn't strictly located in the brain; nevertheless the brain is an enabling system for you to appreciate beauty.

New friends

Ted Warnell
Warnell is a truly unique programmer of art inventions. This artist is the most influential one of his movement (although nobody knows to which one he belongs to). He is a visual artist and writer. His art works and writings on his witting about art and new media can be find in real and online art galleries, in print, digital, and also in web publications. He came to poetics through working with computer languages - machine code, assembly language and programming. He fuses digital imagery with markup language (HTML) and code (JavaScript) to create his web art and poetics. His source material is "code and data, program logic, information from cyberspace, all things digital." He has even found a creative use for spam.

Here are two quotations, about borge's work, that I specially selected for my friend:
"The Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The
Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö." - Borges

"The always wandering meaning of all literary representation
according to which meaning wanders,
like human tribulations, like error, from text to text,
and within the text, from figure to figure." - Bloom

Breakfast with Borges, which was named after the great Argentinian that we deeply admire, is one of the last his Ted made. When he gave it to me as a present, I was deeply moved and wordless.


Rob Bryanton
Rob is a multi-talented canadian author, composer, and sound designer. He is the President of Talking Dog Studios, and of Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association. He has written poems and song lyrics published in several anthologies.

My new friend published a truly innovative book about a "different way of thinking about time and space", called Imagining the Tenth Dimension The companion website for the book has attracted over 4 million unique visitors since its launch in July 2006. In his book he writes about complex concepts of modern science like string theory and how the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of "time") by the vibrations of exquisitely small "superstrings".

In his blog he writes and posts videos about The big bang, Douglas Hofstadter, memes, symmetry, death, multiverse, quantum observer, meditation, genes, philosophy and music among other subjects. In the entry called connecting it all together he talks a about some of the intrest we share.

My uncle and me

My uncle, also known as Mr tree, selected a bunch of letters, spaces and punctuation marks in order to form a queue of characters. He didn't like the sequence that was formed so he added a couple of vowels, extracted a colon and scrambled all the symbols several times. After he posted the results people started witting to him asking for advice (they asked about how to get inspired, the best moment for witting, how to know when a poem is finished, how to be sure if a word is good, and many other things). Uncle had no idea what to tell them but he did not want to disappoint them either so he decided to write the following:The shady side of gray





Dr. Peter Turney expanded and reflected about the entry I called "Differences in the aesthetics between math and art". His text is thought provoking and enlightening at the same time. If you liked my previous post I strongly recommend that you to read this: Differences in the aesthetics between math and art


The great poet and periodist Ryann Manning intreviewed me, you can check it here:Interview

Differences in the aesthetics between math and art

Difference #1:
Mathematical truths are discovered Artistic truths are mediated.

Difference #2:
Mathematicians generally agree on what is mathematically correct. Artists generally have no idea what is artistically correct.

Difference #3:
Math illuminates the supportive skeletal structure of thought whereas Art illuminates the metaphoric wind, which blows through that structure.

Difference #4:
Science reveals the body of "God" and Art reveals "God's" mind -- or is it the converse?

Difference #5:
Pure Mathematics has no expression for metaphor however; it does provide us a structure that can be used for it.

Difference #6:
In general, the mathematician is not interested in finding truths through nonsense as opposed to the artist who is.

Difference #7:
The goal of art is to go beyond language. Mathematics is a language to describe what is beyond us.

Difference #8:
Artists have an insouciant tendency to get lost in their imagination Mathematicians have an attentive tendency to map their imagination

Difference #9:
A mathematical theory seems to come in a flash of intuition before the final product is rigorously constructed.
An artistic theory seems to come much after the artwork that has been constructed in a flash of intuition.

Difference #10:
Mathematical creations are not unique in the sense that they could be discovered by anyone.
Artistic creations are uniquely invented by individuals.

Difference #11:
Mathematics, among other things, is a language.
Art, among other things, uses language.

Difference #12:
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite. —Paul Dirac

Please feel free to add any other difference you can think of, and also to question the proposed ones.

This thoughts where originally written by Kaz Maslanka, in his blog called Mathematical poetry.

The art instinct

Although we humans recognize instinct when we see it in animals, often we're reluctant to see it in ourselves. We prefer to rest assured that we are above all that. We are not slaves to primitive impulses. Our free-willed choices are the result of careful rational deliberation. Yet, the human race has been subjected to the same evolutionary pressures as other animals, so the lack of instinct in humans would truly be odd. It is much more likely that the process of evolution — in both natural selection and sexual selection as described by Charles Darwin — has molded our brains with particular strengths, weakness, and proclivities. Let's call these traits "human nature."

According to the late Stephen Jay Gould, for example, — art is inconsequential to human survival and procreation, and hence cannot be explained by evolution. Art is one of the inexplicable byproducts of the large human brain, a spandrel of evolution, as Gould called them.

Unlike Gould, Dutton Argues that humankind's universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. He thinks that the interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.

Dutton states that the type of painting that is preferred by most people around the globe is, of course, the landscape, and a very particular landscape — one with water, food sources, trees, hiding places, and a path to perhaps another source of food or comfort. It is, in short, the savanna, the home of our Pleistocene ancestors during the period in which we became recognizably human. Our preference for this environment is wired into our brains for "savannas contain more protein per square mile than any other landscape type" as well as offering protection from predators (quickly climb up the tree).

To humans, the language ability is innate, even if the particular language a child first learns is cultural. Seemingly equally innate is the ability of children for make-believe, to construct worlds that mix fantasy (invisible teapot and teacups) with the real (tea always pours down, not up), and to keep the rules of these worlds separate and distinct. Also innate to most children (beginning at the age of 2 or so) is theory of mind — the ability to recognize that other people have internal lives similar to our own, but at the same times uniquely theirs. Consequently, perhaps the oldest art form is storytelling: What began undoubtedly with stories told around the campfire led eventually to more elaborate spoken narratives of legends, written narratives (the Iliad and Odyssey), plays, novels, film, and (much more recently) narrative-based videogames.

What's crucial is that these narratives (either historical, or partly historical, or purely fictional) help us survive. Stories give our brains an opportunity to work out contingencies of response to possible future events. (If a kitten jumps at everything that moves, it is better able to pounce on a real mouse when one shows up.) If we come upon a situation similar to one we once heard about in a story, we are much more likely to deal successfully with that situation and survive to pass on the "storytelling genes." Stories also provide examples of many kinds of people and how their minds work, and hence help us deal with others in social situations. Imaginative storytelling is one of the survival instincts that is packaged into human intelligence.

Dutton concludes that art is an inevitably intrinsic part of human nature, human intelligence, and (no one should be surprised) human sexuality.

Art and science

In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was struggling to reimagine the structure of matter. Previous generations of physicists had thought the inner space of an atom looked like a miniature solar system with the atomic nucleus as the sun and the whirring electrons as planets in orbit. This was the classical model.

But Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” Ordinary words couldn’t capture the data.

The view of science as the sole mediator of everything depends upon one unstated assumption: While art cycles with the fashions, scientific knowledge is a linear ascent. The history of science is supposed to obey a simple equation: Time plus data equals understanding. One day, we believe, science will solve everything.

But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality—about its quantum mechanics and neural origins—the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, “The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery.”

The fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded. In many instances, the opposite has happened, so that our most fundamental sciences are bracketed by utter mystery. It’s not that we don’t have all the answers. It’s that we don’t even know the question.

How can the sciences overcome their present limitation? Science needs the arts for that. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem. It is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories. we need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress

Movies and Art

During the times we are living in, the search for originality has been transformed among artist in a real mass movement, which is common and conventional, that is exactly the same as no-originality.

Passion can be thought as the state of the mind when it is powerfully acted upon and influenced by something external to itself; the state of any particular faculty which, under such conditions, becomes extremely sensitive or uncontrollably excited; It involves emotions, sometimes irrationality and usually an extreme desire.

Movies are an art form; Nevertheless a vast amount of people call Hollywood a movie factory.
This is because movies are being made with formulas that are repeated tons of times, those repetitions include the way scripts are written, the angle cameras are positioned in each scene, the kind of clothes actors use, etc. Given the way people work in these movies they are usually not very interested neither passionate about their jobs; therefore they start working in an automatic way, without getting involved.

It is hard to understand how is it that they believe and make believe that they produce "Art", when they work with even less passion that the one a factory worker has for wrapping raw hamburgers.

When marketers convince us to follow their trends,
the difference between humans and insects gets a little blurrier

Art I

The concept of what art has continuously changed over centuries.

The Latin word "art" it is equivalent to the Greek world "technique". Originally it was applied to everything that human beings produced and to all the disciplines that where learned for producing them. Therefore cooks, gardeners, constructors, painters and poets (among many others) where considered artists.

Now art is generally used to denominate the activity performed by human beings consisting in expressing (among other personal mental contents) ideas, emotions and particular visions of the world, through diverse resources.


In the past artist or artisans used to have almost the lowest social status.Nowadays famous artists (which are not necessarily good artists) are admired and venerated by some parts of society.

Current opinions of what art is differ among themselves more than historical ones.
Here are some interesting examples:
-Art is an expression of our culture and the time in which we live - and `great' art has the potential to transcend cultural boundaries.
- Art is the rubric of human consciousness.
- Art is creativity without strategy.