We remember when, not a long time ago, NanoBanana became available and created a buzz in Marcellus, especially with one of our colleagues who helps in refining our written content to by adding visually appealing images. The not-so-creatively-oriented colleagues of ours have also become experts in visual storytelling as progressive AI models have become better and better at conjuring a photograph, an image, polished text, or now even music. Machine making art is not something many of us would have imagined even a decade ago. In this interesting essay for Aeon, the writer and philosopher J F Martel — author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast — thinks we have the question backwards. The real puzzle is not who or what makes art, but what art has made of us.
He begins underground. In 1940, four teenage boys chasing a rumour of buried treasure tumbled into a hole near Montignac in France and found, instead of gold, the Lascaux caves — chambers “bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls,” some 20,000 years old. Older caves have since surfaced in Australia, Indonesia and Africa. Legend has it that when Picasso visited he emerged declaring “We have invented nothing” — as though art had “appeared full-grown from its earliest instance.” The usual reading is that he was crediting our ancestors; Mr Martel hears something stranger in the line, “namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity.”
First, what is art for? Keats, conversing with his Grecian urn, left us the riddle that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — a coupling that strikes the modern mind as absurd, since beauty so often deceives. The resolution, he argues, lies in dividing truth into two kinds, a move borrowed from the filmmaker Werner Herzog. There is the plainly factual sort, which Herzog dismissively calls “the truth of accountants,” and there is “ecstatic truth,” the thing artists and poets are really after. It “isn’t a label you slap onto accurate statements but an unrepeatable event that comes with the full force of revelation. It is new each time it occurs. There is something weird in it, something that evokes the mystery of existence.” The word comes from the Greek for standing outside oneself, and that is just what it does: it “takes us out of ourselves; it hints at an excess of meaning, over and above what we might otherwise reduce to plain statements of fact.”
He finds the same doubleness in van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. A spoilsport might sniff that it is “just a bunch of crows flying over a field – big deal,” yet the painting reveals “the one thing we can know objectively: the radical mystery that every event, by its mere occurrence, affirms.” The point, he writes, is that Beauty splits along the same seam — between the tidy “beauty of the geometers,” all symmetry and proportion, and a wilder kind that inheres “not in regularity and generality but in the qualitative, the singular, the eventful, the unrepeatable, even the monstrous: beauty as the ecstasy of the strange and the new.” Baudelaire had said as much in 1855, “The Beautiful is always bizarre… it always contains a touch of strangeness… it is this touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty.”
From two truths and two beauties follow two kinds of art. The first he calls artifice — “art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live.” Think of “propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art.” Such work “may elevate or degrade, uplift or depress, edify or delude, but it transforms nothing.” Real art does the opposite. He makes the difference concrete: “What astounds us when we enter a cathedral or contemplate a Mark Rothko is not merely the finished form of these works but the strange transformation each embodies.”
This is where the caves become the heart of the matter. “If art were, at bottom, the narcissistic endeavour that Sigmund Freud and others took it to be,” he writes, “we would expect to see human figures everywhere from the start.” We don’t. The Palaeolithic painters gave horses and bison exquisite anatomical care, yet human figures “with detailed heads, torsos, arms, legs and, most importantly, faces” did not arrive until “around 8 millennia after the Lascaux paintings were made.” The oldest human traces are stencils of hands, and there he pauses to ask, “what is the hand if not the place where the human touches the nonhuman, the very interface of self and world?” His conclusion inverts the usual flattery: “Art has never been a celebration of humanity, but always an exploration of those borderlands where the human ends and something else begins.”
So, in his telling, “art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature.”The question tempts us to picture ancestors “much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures.” The evidence, he counters, “points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted.” We are not the authors of meaning but “participants in something that exceeds us.”
Which is why, he insists, art must be kept useless. Oscar Wilde quipped that “All art… is quite useless,” and yet also claimed that the Impressionists had invented the London fog. As Wilde wrote, “One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence… There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them… They did not exist till Art had invented them.” Monet and his circle, he writes, “did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent.” Art teaches us to see, and so “science begins… in the world that art has made.” Artists, he adds, “alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know.”
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