ORIGINS: The Crisis of Meaning
The test of life in a work of art is its power to rouse our senses to a state of responsive happiness which communicates itself to our whole being: this power is the distinctive quality of the work of art.
Dr. Lorenz Eitner (1919-2009), Stanford University
ORIGINS
The Crisis of Meaning
Today’s art institutions are locked in a profound crisis of meaning, born from a fundamental misunderstanding of art’s very nature.
ITo press art into the service of political ideology,, the contemporary establishment defines art as an intellectual—not a sensual—exercise. This view insists that the purpose of art is to illustrate ideas that present strident critiques of the Western tradition, concentrating heavily on race, gender, historical context, and the ostensible inequities of capitalism.
To justify this takeover, the modern view holds that the formal qualities of a work cannot be viewed in isolation from its social and political context, insisting that these outside forces alone provide the object with meaning.
This position is invariably coupled with a scathing rebuke of formalism itself. The transcendental power of the art experience—the sense of completion and universal connection it brings—is simply too profound to ignore. It is primary to art, and it supersedes any secondary narrative that pretends to attach to it—including political and social transformation. This truth is anathema to the modern institutional view of culture. The power to incite social change comes not from the contentment that culture brings, but from the anxiety and urgency of the political cause.
The public has been relentlessly assaulted with the false assertion that the beholder’s experience of aesthetic beauty is merely an “illusion”—akin to religion—and nothing more than a “Romantic myth” that weakens the human constitution with empty promises of pleasure and joy. Stripping art of its emotional power, the establishment achieves its real objective: distracting the individual away from the inward journey for transformative experience and toward the “greater good”—the collective’s initiative for radical social change. In the hands of our institutions directing culture, art is debased to simply advocating ideas, relegating the masterpiece to mere illustration, a placard full of sloganeering—a poster for the cause.
The Direct Confrontation
When we enter the physical presence of a masterpiece, our reaction is not an intellectual choice, but an involuntary, deeply embedded evolutionary reflex. Modern science has demonstrated that the human brain makes a pre-conscious judgment about the formal composition of a work of art—“extraordinary” or “ordinary”—triggering an emotional response eight times faster than the intellect can disentangle subject matter. When confronting a work of art directly, the human brain is hardwired to prioritize the pleasure of pure aesthetic experience.
All of the ideas that modern researchers find so compelling may be perfectly valid topics for study, but they are all secondary to the direct confrontation with the art object itself.
Whether the work was executed yesterday or three thousand years ago makes no difference. Whether it emerged from Western traditions or a culture entirely foreign to our own does not matter. Whether we have read volumes of history and academic theory or absolutely nothing at all changes nothing.
The human brain is indifferent.
The ability to experience art fully through the lens of formalism is universal to all of mankind, When we stand before a work that we judge to be extraordinary and are moved by it, we are engaging in a perfectly human response that is entirely out of our control. The genesis of art is not located in an intellectual process. The desire and the ability to partake of the unmitigated pleasure of art’s physical beauty is involuntary, it is emotional and it is part of human biology.
It is in our ORIGINS.
And we can prove it…
Neuroscientists have recently discovered that truly masterful compositions—where the formal composition of a work achieves a precise visual tension—evoke massive immediate spikes in neural activity. An ordinary or poorly composed work triggers a weak, scattered response. The brain can recognize “ordinary” instantly and dismiss it. But a work of formal complexity that remains pleasurable to view traps the visual system in a loop of deep engagement.
The Biology of a Masterpiece
If we are predisposed to judge aesthetic quality as ORIGINS suggests, can this be grounded in empirical evidence and validated by scientific inquiry?
Multiple breakthrough studies in the pioneering field of neuroaesthetics have proven that the human brain makes a judgment about the formal qualities of a work of art—whether they are "extraordinary or ordinary," "profound or generic"—within 50 milliseconds of viewing them.
Let’s put that into perspective, A single eye blink takes 100 to 150 milliseconds. Your brain makes an aesthetic judgment in one-third the time it takes to blink your eyes. Your brain communicates this verdict—“extraordinary” or “ordinary”—directly to its pleasure centers. Because this happens at 50 milliseconds and analytical thought doesn’t begin to form until about 400 milliseconds, your brain has triggered an emotional response before the intellect has even had the time to identify subject matter. The human brain is quite literally “hardwired” for aesthetic experience.
Neuroscientists have recently discovered that truly masterful compositions—where the formal composition of a work achieves a precise visual tension—evoke massive immediate spikes in neural activity. Conversely, an ordinary or poorly composed work triggers a weak, scattered response; the brain recognizes mediocrity instantly and dismisses it. But a work of formal complexity that remains pleasurable to view traps the visual system in a loop of deep engagement. Even more remarkable is the fact that this all happens pre-consciously.
Kengo Kuma, The Portland Botanical Gardens
Kengo Kuma
To build our cultural village, we went to its origins…
Although not the first to develop a cultural village—its birth dates to the late 19th century—the architect Kengo Kuma is instrumental in combining the concept with traditional Japanese monzenmachi—towns that developed just outside the gates of sacred shrines and temples. Disenchanted with the concrete edifices he was designing as a young architect, Kuma retreated to the Japanese countryside and immersed himself in rural traditions. Here, surrounded by the dense Japanese forest, he learned the value of dissolving any boundary that obstructed the unity of a built environment with its surrounding landscape. This led him to abandon the imposing “object” architecture of new museum construction. By dispersing all of the functions of an art museum to a loose cluster of small-scale, low-lying pavilions, he discovered a method of construction that conformed to—not dominate over—the existing landscape.
Kengo Kuma’s best known project is the cultural village he designed in 2017 for the Portland Botanical Gardens. A superb example of the seamless union between built and natural environments, the project illustrates Kuma’s unwavering commitment to locally-sourced construction material. The complex is composed almost entirely of timber and stone—and includes the unusual use of sod as a roofing material. The architectural design is clean, austere and without ornament. Kuma’s inventive use of wood screens in both the interiors and exteriors of the pavilions demonstrates his sensitivity to natural light and embodies the Japanese concept of “komorebi”—dappled light that filters through trees. Included in the village are galleries, a bookstore, cafe, library and administrative offices.
For Artists
Kengo Kuma, The Portland Botanical Gardens
