Art Is Irrelevant

From a Letter to Neil

Do you know Andy Goldsworthy? (And whatever happened to names like "Andrew"? Why is everybody these days Jim or Jack or Bill or Pete or Sam?) I rented a video on him earlier this year – "Rivers and Tides," it was called, rather airy-fairy – and noticed an article about him in a recent number of the middlebrow Smithsonian magazine. His specialty is evanescent constructions built in the woods. You know, icicles stuck together or piles of twigs or leaves glued in place with spit. The first wind or tide or sunbeam destroys them. There's something precious about this, but I can dig it. He correctly sees the congruence between doing art that way and doing art at all. The mag quotes him as saying, "Nature for me isn't the bit that stops [i.e. 'stays'] in the national parks. It's in a city, in a gallery, in a building. It's everywhere we are." Share it, brother. I believe that. I believe that art per se is evanescent, and not just because everything we make, even poetry, will eventually be lost or forgotten. The fact – I'm sure it's a fact – is that art itself is irrelevant. Not right now, but in the larger scheme of things. It exists, like religion, because of the baggage we carry in our genes, a leftover from all that tiresome evolution. Think apophenia, think pareidolia.

Unsurprisingly, Arthur Clarke, that prissy old fuddy-duddy described by Alfred Bester as having absolutely no sense of humor, saw this a long time ago. In "The Mind of the Machine," written back in the men-like-gods what-is-truth go-go 60's, he noted: "As our knowledge, our power, and above all our maturity increase, we will have less and less need for art. Ultraintelligent machines would have no use for it at all."

You know I'm no humanist, anything but. I live in the sure hope that the human species will make itself obsolete by building a better machine (organic or otherwise). To our successors, any art we've done will be, as I said, irrelevant. But we're not there yet, and I can go along with another citation from the saintly Andy, tendentious though it is: "I think the very best works are the ones that could only have been made in one place at that moment and could never be repeated."

For you and me and some few others, making art provides that illusion of purpose that gets us out of bed in the morning. But. However monumental and momentous a hunk of art may seem to us, it'll eventually be washed away by one of Andy's or Arthur's tides.

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We Provide Equal Time: Neil's Rebuttal

NATURALLY, what we create as men will wash away with the tides but that is not relevant, in the least, to me. So long as it lasts long enough to talk even once to some future, that is my less than lofty goal. I totally disagree with the premise that the advancement of intellect will leave art behind. That is the mind of a mere mechanical engineer who muses about his ideal of a future, not that of one concerned with the past and the the future of thought and idea.

Art, on the contrary, is that very goal of intelligence and intellect. I am astounded how very stupid seemingly intellectual and intelligent high IQ people are when standing before artworks. They have no clue, no understanding or, at best, a naive understanding of the subtle wonder of art and the high intellectual level that is required to create the best work.

Music, poetry, literature, painting and sculpture all share this lofty level of the synthesis of form and content. Computers and whatever they evolve into will be just the tools to do better, the creative mind's innermost thoughts. The chance that a computer will compete with the higher levels of human intellect during the next what? century? millennium? Who can say? It will compete but not replace the mind.

Art being that epitome of intellectual activity does not evolve as, say, a scientific theory as it is based not upon a kind of aggrandizement of knowledge but rather is the result of a near infinitude of cellular relationships that are part and parcel of the artist's unusual brain structure which, one day, will be revealed just as Einstein's subtle brain variation was recently so revealed but until then, it remains a mystery.

The non- verbal right brain is the great mystery here and without its nuances and craziness, we are just boring automatons, filled with intellectual insight, rational conclusion, forthright, straight ahead absoluteness of purpose but lacking any real reason for existence other than to earn bread, slam up a new big box store for the boss, propagate when testosterone or estrogen dictate to do so or crack a beer. The artist, on the other hand, dreams and creates most of the time even if it is not conscious and when the artist grabs the tools of his choice and begins the task to communicate and explore the new intellectual landscape that he has propagated in that strange and wandering neural pathway of his right brain, it is then that the human race...becomes human.

Point-and-Shoot Landscape Photography

It's December, and I'm on vacation, and I've spent a good part of the month (and I do mean the good part) in the woods taking pictures – nothing very grand, mostly just postcard-and-calendar shots. I think of it as therapy.

In the bad old days (that is, in the 70's) I used a Toyo Field View 4x5 for landscape work, except when I treated myself to a walk unencumbered by anything but my twin-lens Rollei. These days I generally use a Canon 20D, but when what I really want is exercise and, well, walking in the woods, I travel light, much lighter than I did in the heyday of the Rollei. I carry a point-and-shoot and a reasonably light tripod. Till a little over a year ago the P&S was a Canon S50; then it was a Fuji E550; now it's a Canon S80. The tripod hasn't changed (since I can't afford the graphite model I'd like): it's a Manfrotto (no model number visible) with the 3262QR ball head. The camera looks comical on a tripod, even this little one, but I'm taking photos, not posing for them. Generally I leave the camera mounted and locked into the head. I know the tripod makes a fine lever arm for smashing the S80 if I fall and swing it against a rock or a tree, but the camera's not expensive, so I bought two. My wife wouldn't mind if I borrowed hers till a replacement arrived.

The S50 was a five-megapixel P&S; the Fuji used the odd but satisfactory "Super CCD" chip, which was six megapixels or, with interpolation (which I always used), twelve. The S80 has moved up to eight megapixels. The sensor itself is still the usual minuscule thing, and I don't know how Canon gets away with so little noise, but it's not bad. My standard setup is ISO 50 (hence the tripod) and f/5.6. I generally dial down the exposure comp, since I prefer a dark image.

The S80's two big shortcomings are lack of a RAW mode and poor coverage at its shortest focal length (28mm equivalent), but it's quite usable in most circs and can still deliver Canon's slick look.

I'm certainly not preaching the P&S gospel to landscape photographers, but thought it might amuse you to know what I use and why.