An Artistic Vision for the 21st Century

This is a challenge to artists and religious leaders to address the questions that really count.

Wedding Flowers - Acrylic 20X20

The great artists of the 21^st Century will be scientists who find the nexus between art, science and ethics.  If we get lucky, maybe one will find the nexus between art, science and a new form of inclusive world religion.  This next generation of great artists will understand science and to some degree be scientists themselves. But caution!

This does not mean producing art that mimics science fair projects by illustrating scientific data.  That is how present artistic endeavor fails.  Artists are called to synthesize scientific data and use it to inspire humans to a greater good.  It is the expression of ethics at its highest level.

The Scientific Revolution now accelerates.  While the agrarian revolution that pushed humans from hunter gathers to farmers lasted 3,500 years, the scientific revolution will be faster paced with change packed into each generation.  Art and religion must play their parts as the 21^st century advances this revolution with robots, space exploration, extended life spans, and the colonization of another planet.

The Sciences and The Arts Cassidy, (former professor of chemistry at Yale University) believes that scientific thought can be reduced to three general forms:

1.  Analytic activity that involves accumulating data;

2.  Synthesis of that data that seeks connections and formulate explanatory theories; and,

3.  Reduction of these processes to practice or the activity which returns thought from the general back to the practical application.

It is the first of these two thought processes (analytic and synthesis) that distinguish art and science.  While both art and science engage in all three forms of thought, art should focus more on presenting synthesized thought with its sense of inspiration.  Science focuses more on analytical thought.  Engineering and other areas focus more on reduction, meaning practical application.

Much of the current combination of art and science fails at this level.  While it tries to show scientific data or facts with interesting displays, it lapses into the realm of mimicking science fair projects and illustrating facts with factual thinking.  Art needs to synthesize science and address larger human issues.  It is this level of synthesis that can inspire.

To synthesize data means to give expression of complex ideas and the relationship between ideas in a simple and direct manner.  This requires that the artist be an integrated person.  That is a person who thinks both in the logic of science and interprets and synthesizes with feeling and compassion to inspire.

To inspire others calls on our sense of ethics, to some a sense of a Creator.   The essential questions humans face are now defined by both science and religion—or if you prefer, ethics.  Who am I?  How did I get here?  What is my purpose?  Today none of these issues can be considered without including scientific knowledge of outer space such as the known existence of thousands of galaxies and a true estimate of our earth—less than a speck of sand in the cosmos.

Artists need to find those truths for our time that are absolute.  I do not mean the absolute “truth” of extremists or even evangelicals, but those ideals that engender the sacred nature of this consciousness.  It is the duty that all people have toward one another who share a small but beautiful planet.

The need for absolute values is necessary to evaluate anything, including art.  It is analogous to a base line for scientific experiments.  To evaluate, you must have something to measure art work against.  It is where the act of evaluation begins.  Rather than shy away from ethical thinkers, artists need to embrace them and make ethics their own journey.

Artists should consider pictures of the Hubble telescope that show billions of galaxies and the birth of stars as we ponder our size.  Only five hundred years ago people thought the earth was the center of the universe.  How can we accept ourselves as part of the cosmos, so big that it is virtually unimaginable?  Can artists present this experience visually?  Can an artist help people consider whether our being is such a part of the cosmos that our consciousness, however small, provides a record of what happens on earth?

Is the cosmos a sensate being?  Does the Incubator Nebula (also known as the Eagle Nebula) that births stars have a consciousness?  Is the energy of the cosmos that generates new stars, collapses old ones, and gives eons of life to so much energy be a part of the “resurrection” that so many religions teach?  Is “resurrection” really the transformation of energy that we now see in the cosmos throughout thousands of galaxies?  Is death really transformation, most immediately ourselves but eventually our earth and the entire universe?

If the cosmos links human destiny, are artists required to explain the cosmos to others so that they can share in this understanding?  Or is most of the world to be lost to tribal schism and ignorance?  How do artists help in this process, especially if they are asked to communicate to those who do speak another language, or do not read or write or perhaps know nothing of vast outer space?

This is a challenge.  Artists and religious leaders, let’s address the questions that really count.