The Nexus of Art, Science & Ethics of the Universe:

May 13

16 min read

Updated: May 18

A Vision for the 21st Century and Its Impact on Artists and Art Schools.

By Elta Marie Wilson, DMin, JD, MS, MA

The issue is art about what and why. With the Scientific Revolution upon us, the next generation of great artists will be scientists. The 21st Century foretells the accelerated impact of science upon the world. Artists should incorporate science into their work on the basis of three criteria: (1) the synthesis of scientific principles, (2) artistic content, and (3) inspiring the viewer. Today’s art that attempts to incorporate science tends to avoid synthesis, and instead, resembles boring science fair projects. This is a call for artists to synthesize scientific data and to present art that inspires the coming generation born to the Scientific Revolution with ethical, and even religious, commitment to the world.

Table of Contents

Summary page

The Scientific Revolution 4

Science and Art – Beyond Science Fair Projects 5

Vision for the 21^st Century 6

Historically Based Art Analysis Is Obsolete 7

The Example of “Environmental Art” 8

Implications for Art Schools 9

Scholarly Standards 9

Conclusion 11

Footnotes 12

Photo Essay: A Nexus of Art, Science and Religion 13

Cosmic Mother with Background Radiation 14, 15

Black Hole II 16, 17

Christ Melds into Eagle Nebula (M16) 18, 19

Cosmic Mother in Pleiades 20, 21

Black Madonna 22, 23

Eve Picnics Under the Butterfly Nebula 24, 25

Follow the Light I: Milky Way and Colorado River 26, 27

Follow the Light II: Mesa Verde 28, 29

Milky Way Over Portland 30, 31

Medusa Redeemed 32, 33

Age of Discernment 34, 35, 36

Summary

The Scientific Revolution

It is hard to look down at your toes and know where you are. That is the position we find ourselves in. The Scientific Revolution will be far greater than anything the world has yet experienced and will change human’s view of themselves to a greater extent than anything yet seen on this earth – but we sleep through it. To find ourselves, let’s quickly look backward with an historical analysis. Let this discussion flush over the reader as it seems almost all too obvious.

The Agrarian Revolution began around 9000 BCE when the ice that had covered much of northern Europe for thousands of years melted. (Note that today the glaciers of both in Tibet and our Glacier National Park have ALL melted.) After a transitional period, what was the Stone Age transformed into the Neolithic Age. People went from using stones for tools and living in caves to a settled agrarian lifestyle. It changed human life to this very day.

None of this information is new. In fact, it is accepted scholarly discourse and taught in schools through the world.[1] Today more technologically advanced communities of the world are agrarian and industrial based – but change is afoot. Look for a moment at a visual representation of this time scale:.___________________________________________________________.____.

9000 BCE 0 AD present

Today dawns the Golden Age of Astronomy and Space Exploration. Who doubts that within a short 100 years we will be landing on other planets—or perhaps within 50 years. Since the first moon landing in 1969 just 40 years ago – about .3% of the time since humans started agriculture – we have begun space exploration. We talk, text and watch TV on cell phones, use computers daily, photo shop everything in sight and use the web for everything from porn to college. All that in 40 years, yet this list omits the first real test of our humanity.

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In 2008, Hubble revealed Abell 1689, the largest group of galaxy clusters ever found to that date. What we thought was a dark area of space, held thousands of galaxies. Human beings were forever changed. Not just stars. Galaxies like our own Milky Way. If humans had any thought remaining that we were important to the cosmos, they were dashed once and for all. The changes that humans made from the Stone Age throughout the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions will be small in comparison to the changes brought by space exploration. Those unwilling to consciously embrace this knowledge are obsolete. Unfortunately, that includes nearly the entire art world. While humanity stands on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution, much of the art world draws designs.

The past 1100 years held few changes compared to scientific discoveries of the last 40 years. Think back to when Michelangelo painted the view of Christendom that the earth was flat and the center of the world. His work has stood as the greatest influence on Western art for nearly 500 years. But no more.

Science and Art – Beyond Science Fair Projects

Now we must re-size humans. Who are we? What is our role in the universe? What is the cosmos? The cosmos gives birth to stars and planetary systems, but does it have its own consciousness? We already know that space has all the needed ingredients for carbon based life. All the proteins and elements are there. Are we the only form of life? Are there others less or more advanced than ourselves?

rt today rarely begins to consider any of these questions. Most is mired in self-absorbed design without any ethical basis for its existence, perhaps other than self-awareness. I fully support being self-aware; however, it does not stand alone. Self-awareness must translate into an understanding of others and an awareness of the external world.

This must be accompanied by well thought out values. Is peace of greater benefit than war? To what extent? Is there justified war? How in this world do we all get along? If tribal societies insist on fighting, why not just let them kill each other? If they involve us, why not just kill them? At what point are self-regulated civilizations willing and able to aid those societies that are insistent on uncontrolled population growth without the ability to support themselves? Is there any art in this country that considers any of these questions? None.

Most art continues in its historical approach. Artists draw designs. Some experiment with color like Rothko. Picasso looked at different plains and drew as he felt. While understanding the past and color and the self are all legitimate concerns, none are enough. Art needs to know where it is going.

This does not mean producing art that mimics science fair projects by illustrating scientific data. That is how present artistic endeavor has failed, and it shows the lack of insight and true creative thought of most of the Leonardo DiVinci Journal published through MIT. Great scientific and artistic thought merge in a well-considered vision of the future. Artists—like scientists-- are called to synthesize scientific data and use it to inspire humans to a greater good. Art needs a vision of the future.

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Vision for the 21st Century

The great artists of the 21st 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! Art must be an expression of ethics and science at its highest level.

The Scientific Revolution now accelerates. The 21st century will be the continued culmination of this revolution with robots, space exploration, extended life spans, and the colonization of another planet. Art must play its part, and artists must be prepared. In The Sciences and The Arts[2] Cassidy argues 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 formulates 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 two thought processes of analysis 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 for 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 concrete images founded in data recitation. Art needs to synthesize scientific theories and address larger human issues. It is at this level of synthesis that art can inspire.

To synthesize data means to give expression to complex ideas and their relationship to other ideas in a 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 the creative juice of feeling and compassion.

To inspire others calls on our sense of ethics, to some a sense of a Creator or to others a concept of the Cosmos. 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? None of these issues can now be reasonably faced without including scientific knowledge of outer space, galaxies, and a true estimate of our size—less than a speck of sand within the cosmos.

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Artists need to find those truths for our time that are absolute. By this, not the absolute “truth” of extremists or even evangelicals, but those ideals that engender hope, knowledge, kindness, compassion, and most of all 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, please consider pictures of the Hubble Telescope with billions of galaxies and the birth of stars. They make every thoughtful human being ponder our size. Only five hundred years ago people thought the earth was the center of the universe. We are small, very small. 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 here, of its beauty, energy, and development?

Artists, does the Incubator Nebula (also known as the Eagle Nebula and designated M16) that births stars have a consciousness? Could the energy of the cosmos that generates new stars, collapses old ones, be 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 speak another language, or do not read or write or perhaps know nothing of vast outer space? This is my challenge: Artists and art teachers, address the questions that really count.

Historically based art analysis is obsolete.

Critique methods using traditional historical analysis do not take into account two main factors. First, current culture is based on gigantic scientific leaps that have taken place over the last 20 years. The 21st century fundamentally differs from the past by such common, daily activities as computers, use of the web for information, cell phones and other electronics, DVDs, genetic research, pictures from the Hubbell telescope, microwaves, International Space Station and on and on. The impact on the world seems to have missed much of art analysis. The educated elite have begun space exploration. Where are the artists?

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The second factor that is missed by critics is the complete lack of any moral or ethical basis for art. Contemporary religions have not responded to scientific knowledge and are now outdated except to those who choose to derive some form of moral structure from it in an effort to order their lives. Art reflects this. No one is asking, “Why did you draw this? What is your point? What does this mean? What inspiration does it provide? What is it analyzing?” Instead, any design that suits the artist’s fancy is OK. As a result, critical issues are not being addressed in the art world.

For many years, art has been analyzed in historical context. For example Shiner’s The Invention of Art – A Cultural History is an excellent historical analysis of art and places many works into understandable context of their time, but this kind of analyses mires are in events of the past. [3] Like most current analyses based in historical context, he offers no vision of the future.

The Example of “Environmental Art”

It is rare to find an excellent work of environmental art that inspires while addressing any significant environmental issue. I salute Todd McCain for his inspiring sculptures of 5 extinct North American birds, yet most so-called “Environmental Art” sadly misses the mark. We now face the most severe environmental crisis in the history of mankind with environmental warming and carbon dioxide pollution. However, artists, teachers and even art museums support either modeled traditional art or abstract art. Neither speaks to the future. Something is fundamentally wrong.

What we really mean by “environmental art” is more fully termed “Environmental Protection Art.” The Library of Congress figured it out, and classifies environmental art under subheadings that designate the particular area of the environment addressed. The term “environmental art” is just too broad since it can infer just about everything on the face of the earth and even the earth itself. The phrase “Environmental Protection Art” integrates the sciences and the arts.

I suggest that artists use scientific subcategories to reference environmental art i.e.: “environmental art re climatology.” However, to the artist, environmental art goes beyond science. For example, environmental art about energy policy, or environmental art about oil spills. To the artist, environmental art may encompass science, politics, religion, and any ethical system of judgment. It even questions the determinism of science itself.

Initially, environmental protection art generally began with the land artists of the 1970s – 1990s. From there it devolved into quasi science with less and less political messaging. For example, see those examples shown in Beardsley’s Earthworks and Beyond such as the Spiral Jetty and Goldsworthy.[4] Ede’s Art & Science[5] confirms that artists have generally engaged in macabre, science fiction – almost science fair projects gone a rye. Quasi machinery or use of light is interesting, but it does not suggest a vision of the future. These projects generally have no discernible meaning.

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Some artists have chosen to use the designs found in scientific observation to invent imagined designs of great beauty. It approaches a new form of realism such as Susan Aldworth’s Brainscape[6] and Andrew Carnie’s Magic Forest of neuron patterns that he colored to look like trees.[7] While beautiful, there is no vision of the future or meaning here.

Artists and scientists are both visionaries. Artists have seemingly lost this. Instead of thought, they substitute wild imagination, as if creativity and originality are a substitute for thought. Leonardo drew a helicopter when it was still just science fiction, yet it was still disciplined thought. I suggest that artists need to return to discipled thought, and present their message in a straight forward manner.

Implications for Art Schools

21st Century artists must be skilled in science. Art schools and colleges should meet this challenge. Interdisciplinary education and degrees are critical. Let us encourage artists to engage science without the threat of total failure. Many artists are not great mathematicians. They understand color more than calculus, yet they need training. Can mathematics, astronomy, and physics professors expose artists to their disciplines in general terms? Can art students receive class credit for watching DVDs or videos that explain science and then use this knowledge in their art work? For example, can an artist take a “Great Course” (www.shopgreatcourses.com), paint what inspired the artist, and receive school credit?

Present art professors are not equipped to teach anything about science. Few have any understanding of logical, scientific thought, and most even snub it as beneath them. But it is the integration of both scientific and artistic thought that will create art for the 21st Century. Art teachers need to retrain, and scientific information needs to be made available to both art students and art teachers.

There is such a gap between art and science today that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) has begun to train scientists in art – but not the other way around. This great institution only offers art to undergraduate scientists. They do not have a degree in art at any level. MIT even trains its scientists in writing. They do not train English majors, only science majors in how to write science. Artists of all kinds are being left behind in the scientific revolution simply because they do not have the knowledge of science to produce art that synthesizes scientific principles.

Although commendable, MITs’ efforts seem failed as I read its Leonardo DiVinci Journal. Most of the “artistic” offerings look like science fair projects—visual representations of a scientific principle. Virtually none synthesize scientific data in a way that could inspire anyone. Where is their artists’ vision of the future? Where are their values—yes VALUES?

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Scholarly Standards

Higher scholarly standards are a corollary to the need for artists to analyze their work based on the criteria that includes the synthesis of scientific principles, and inspiring the viewer. We must raise the bar. Much of current art, and specifically abstract art, focuses on the internal, psychological journey of the artist and offers the viewer a subconscious stream of design—Gestalt, if you will. It is visual psychoanalysis. In and of itself, psychoanalytic art, created from a deep sense of self with an artistic eye, is certainly a valid point of view. But to encompass an artist’s entire endeavor and engulf the entire art world, it is not enough. Psychoanalysis or the Gestalt of art was never intended as the ultimate goal—the end in and of itself. Personal expression and understanding is what helps us to understand others, to reach for the human experience and to inspire and encourage and engage the world. Art needs to grow beyond itself and over personalized thinking.

In addition, the over wrought prose that accompanies much of art analysis must be rejected. Here is an example of total gobble-de-gook:

This book is not in itself designed to generate new specific criticism of Land and Environmental Art, but rather to bring together an array of observations, meditations, explications and calls to action in a contextual orbit around a strongly gravitational cultural body. It is in this interplay within a loose editorial framework, rather than in any explicit authorial inscription, where readers will be able to build bridges between what might seem distant location in the socio-cultural landscape. (p. 17)[8]

Another all too common attitude is the false positive. See for example Weather Report: Art and Climate Change[9]in which Lippard acted as curator for artists engaged to produce environmental art. Their works were poor, yet Lippard settled for all of it and even touts them in her book. For example Inigo-Manglano-Ovalle’s Iceberg Beyond the Irish Sea, England, 2005, used data from a real iceberg to create his 25 foot sculpture.[10] At best this work reflects only data and is outright boring. Another example is Natasha Mayers’ Whitefield Welcomes Global Warming/Whitefield Concerned Citizens Urge Action on Global Warming (also entitled “Hot new fashions from L.L. Bean winter collection”).[11] It is a picture of 8 people waving and playing in winter outfits that have been cut to show more skin during hot weather. Juvenile. Another example is a hunter field dressing a caribou with (gasp) blood showing.[12] Again, juvenile. Yet Lippard thinks this is great. It is not.

Lippard settled for a pittance. Good mentors are not always nice. Sometimes people simply need to be told to do their jobs without excuses. I might add that Lippard could well have a secondary agenda: the better the art work, the more kudos to the curator; the more visitors to the art show, the more money. I hold Lippard accountable as she should have held her artists accountable.

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Remember that Michelangelo’s mentor the Pope was not a simple, nice man that settled for so-so work. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel because he had to, and he had to do a good job. False positive reviews of artists serve only to perpetuate poor work. Secondary agendas need to be substituted with demands for good, inspirational work.

An example of an artist striving to inspire others, Mierle Laderman Ukeles seeks the genuine nexus between art and science. She began her work at a landfill by learning the science of landfill trash. Then she synthesized her knowledge into art and used it to inspire and serve the community. Her method reduces synthesis to its functional level, an area more often visited by engineers yet still a valid artistic endeavor. I salute her.

Art critics, state your case and back it up with observation, evidence, and analysis. Include good photographs. Write simply and directly. Get to the point. Since when did this even become a question in the academic world? Anything less is not good enough.

Students should likewise be required to state the reasoning behind their works of art. Design alone is not enough. What is represented and why? What does it mean? What is the thought process behind it? How was it planned and executed—even if it was made from gun powder like Cai Guo-Qiang![13] Nothing less is acceptable in an academic environment. Students should be pressed to think and synthesize their thoughts and experience and knowledge with their art for the betterment of all and to inspire all. That should be the ultimate goal of art school.

Conclusion

Science can be destructive to art if considered only at the level of analytic data. Art and science should integrate to synthesize data and to inspire others. Art is not an imitation of science. It is not science fair projects. It is the artistic expression of values and quandaries and conundrums that face each person that walks the earth—or inhabits the cosmos.

Art must not sacrifice the great questions of humanity about our place, our size, and our purpose for self-indulgent, abstract design. We must not substitute a moment of sensation for thoughtful examination. Michelangelo painted the world as he knew it -- flat and the center of the universe. Now we must paint it as we know it -- an expanding cosmos. And remember, Michelangelo was driven by a demanding mentor, a Pope who never gave in to his whims and moods. Art professors would do well to toughen up, both on themselves and their students. No excuses.

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Footnotes:

[1] Kleiner, Fred S., Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, 13 ed., Vol. I, Thomson – Wadsworth, 2009, Boston, Mass.[2] Cassidy, Harold Gomes, The Sciences and the Arts – A New Alliance, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962)

[3] Shiner, Larry, The Invention of Art - A Cultural History, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)

[4] Beardsley, John, Earthworks and Beyond, 4th ed. (Abbeville Press Publishers, New York, 2006)

[5] Ede, Sian, Art & Science (New York: I. B. Tauris Et Co. Ltd., 2005)

[6] Wilson, Stephen, Art and Science, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2010) at p. 68.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Kastner, Jeffrey, ed., and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996) at p. 17. My apologies for being confrontational, yet it must be said.

[9] Lippard, Lucy R., Curator, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (Colorado: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts, 2007)[10] Ibid at p. 81.

[11] Ibid at p. 85.

[12] Ibid at p. 25.

[13] Art: 21, Art in the 21st Century Season 3, 2003. (Video

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Elta M. Wilson

eltawilson.com

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