{"id":156,"date":"2004-09-21T22:11:24","date_gmt":"2004-09-22T03:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=156"},"modified":"2004-09-21T22:11:24","modified_gmt":"2004-09-22T03:11:24","slug":"the-art-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=156","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my earliest blog essays (<a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?m=200205#65'>Terror Becomes Bad<br \/>\nArt<\/a>) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing &#8220;artist&#8221; who created<br \/>\na brief scare back in 2002.  Arguably more disturbing than Helder&#8217;s<br \/>\n&#8220;art&#8221; was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none<br \/>\nof the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with had<br \/>\never taught him any better and his own talent was not sufficient to<br \/>\ncarry him beyond their limits.<\/p>\n<p>I am not the first to observe that something deeply sick and<br \/>\ndysfunctional happened to the relationship between art, popular<br \/>\nculture, and technology during the crazy century we&#8217;ve just exited.<br \/>\nTom Wolfe made the point in <a href='http:\/\/www.billemory.com\/NOTES\/wolfe.html'>The Painted Word<\/a><br \/>\nand expanded on it in <cite>From Bauhaus To Our House<\/cite>. Frederick Turner<br \/>\nexpanded the indictment in a <cite>Wilson Quarterly<\/cite> essay on<br \/>\nneoclassicism which, alas, seems not to be available on line.<\/p>\n<p>If we judge by what the critical establishment promotes as &#8220;great<br \/>\nart&#8221;, most of today&#8217;s artists are bad jokes.  The road from Andy<br \/>\nWarhol&#8217;s soup cans to Damien Hirst&#8217;s cows in formaldehyde has been<br \/>\nneither pretty nor edifying.  Most of &#8220;fine art&#8221; has become a moral,<br \/>\nintellectual, and esthetic wasteland in which whatever was originally<br \/>\nhealthy in the early-modern impulse to break the boundaries of<br \/>\nreceived forms has degraded into a kind of numbed-out nihilism.<\/p>\n<p>There are exceptions, though &mdash; artists who engage the world, who<br \/>\nare deeply involved with ideas, and who playfully incorporate all the<br \/>\npossibilities of our technological age into their work.  When I was a<br \/>\nguest of honor at Arisia 2004 I had the good fortune to meet one of<br \/>\nthese; <a href='http:\/\/www.arthurganson.com'>Arthur Ganson<\/a>, an<br \/>\nartist\/engineer who creates beautiful and sometimes disturbing kinetic<br \/>\nsculptures.<\/p>\n<p>One that I&#8217;ve just discovered is <a href='http:\/\/www.bathsheba.com\/artist\/'>Bathsheba Grossman<\/a>. She<br \/>\nvisualizes and then realizes beautiful ideas from mathematics,<br \/>\ncosmology, and organic chemistry.  Contemplate her <a href='http:\/\/www.bathsheba.com\/crystalsci\/largescale\/'>Large Scale<br \/>\nModel<\/a>, an image of the galactic clusters in the three hundred<br \/>\nmillion cubic light years around Earth &mdash; an eidolon of a<br \/>\nsubstantial fraction of the observable universe laser-etched into a<br \/>\nthree-inch-tall glass block.<\/p>\n<p>It isn&#8217;t quite &#8220;to see the Universe in a grain of sand&#8221;, but nobody<br \/>\nwith more sensitivity than a brick could fail to have dizzying and<br \/>\nwonderful vistas of time\/space and paradoxical thoughts about scale in<br \/>\nthe presence of this luminously beautiful work of art.  All too many<br \/>\nartists portentiously claim that what art is supposed to do is induce<br \/>\none to meditate on one&#8217;s place in the universe, then deliver pettiness<br \/>\n(or perhaps a toxic political screed) as the punchline.<br \/>\nMs. Grossman&#8217;s Large Scale Model is the real deal, and a hard slap in<br \/>\ntheir faces.<\/p>\n<p>Or contemplate Ms. Grossman&#8217;s gorgeous metal sculptures, derived<br \/>\nfrom mathematical forms by a process that combines hand-modelling with<br \/>\nCAD and produced with cutting-edge 3D-printing technology.  It&#8217;s not<br \/>\njust the end results that are beautiful but the whole dialogue between<br \/>\nart and technology implicit in her<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/www.bathsheba.com\/sculpture\/process\/'>technique<\/a>.<br \/>\nAfter reading about it, I am not surprised to learn that she sometimes<br \/>\nwrites her own modeling software &mdash; and, having seen her art, I<br \/>\nwould lay a healthy bet that she writes damn <em>good<\/em> software.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s something refreshing even about Ms. Grossman&#8217;s most narrowly<br \/>\ncommercial work.  She will laser-etch the protein structure of your<br \/>\nchoice into glass, using the same technique as in the Large Scale<br \/>\nModel, for prices starting at $145.  These images of cloudy, intricate<br \/>\nstructure are visually beautiful enough as abstracts, but they derive<br \/>\ntheir true power from being <em>about something<\/em>.  About<br \/>\nhemoglobin, the molecule in your blood that carries oxygen.  Or about<br \/>\nthe DNA polymerase crucial in cell replication, or the<br \/>\nneurotransmitter acetylcholinesterase.  Each one is a joyful<br \/>\ncelebration of our ability to know, to find beauty and meaning in the<br \/>\ncomplexity of the natural universe.<\/p>\n<p>To see these craft objects, unashamedly made for money (that&#8217;ll be<br \/>\n$40 extra for molecular-surface etching, thank you), is to have your<br \/>\nnose rubbed in the desperate poverty of most modern art, to be<br \/>\nreminded of the vacuum at its core and the pathetic Luke Helders that<br \/>\nthe vacuum spawns.  It&#8217;s a poverty of meaning, a parochialism that<br \/>\ninsists that the only interesting things in the universe are the<br \/>\nartist&#8217;s own psychological and political quirks.<\/p>\n<p>Bathsheba Grossman&#8217;s art reminds us that exploration of the narrow<br \/>\nconfines of an artist&#8217;s head is a poor substitute for artistic<br \/>\nexploration of the universe.  It reminds us that what the artist owes<br \/>\nhis audience is beauty and discovery and a sense of connection, not<br \/>\nalienation and ugliness and neurosis and political ax-grinding.<\/p>\n<p>Forgetting this value rotted the core out of the fine arts and<br \/>\nliterary fiction of the 20th century. We can hope, though, that<br \/>\nartists like her and Arthur Ganson will show the way forward to<br \/>\nremembering it.  Only in that way will the unhealthy chasm between<br \/>\npopular and fine art be healed, and fine art be restored to a healthy<br \/>\nand organic relationship with culture as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my earliest blog essays (Terror Becomes Bad Art) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing &#8220;artist&#8221; who created a brief scare back in 2002. Arguably more disturbing than Helder&#8217;s &#8220;art&#8221; was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none of the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=156\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Art of Science<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}