TOM FURY

In this view, beauty resides in the tension between two mental spaces, a presentation and a reference, a tension maintained by the phenomenological impossibility of subordinating one of these to the other. When this conjuncture is obtained, it triggers an acute awareness both of the sensory forms of things and of their emotional meaning—a momentary polarization of attention, a split or crisis that can affect our relations to things, persons, and thoughts very deeply.

In the scope of human evolution, the early cultural presence of artistry in the visual register, and apparently also in the auditory (cf. the early appearance of musical instruments) and the motor registers (dance), may have been of great importance to the emergence of symbolization and abstraction in general. The artistic version of the iconic double-input space network leads our minds toward intentional 2-D graphics as a “scriptural” possibility—that is, the idea of intentionally and systematically producing formal events, thereby calling upon abstract forces to accomplish tasks (cf. spelling and spell-casting) in relation to the idealized referential contents.

If this hypothesis is true, then mental space semantics is an archaic semantic format which gave rise to art—and, through aesthetic semantics, perhaps to primitive mathematics (metrics, numbering, set orderings, classification, calculus) and eventually to verbal language. In the latter, pairings of form and meaning, supported only by a gestural syntax—the “shadow” image of the situational scenario, with its acts, agents, and case morphology constitute grammars and build up of wildly unrealistic, delirious, or poetic utterances as easily as they do concrete accounts of states of affairs.

But if the millennia of human cultural evolution provide the basic temporal perspective necessary to understand what art is about, what would be the role of art history, the historical development of dramatically distinct styles in painting? At a minimum, we will have to consider the dynamic historicity of manners, styles, norms, preferences, and critical discourses intimately related to art, and try to understand their “ontology”: if beauty itself is trans-historical, what is it that makes artists modify their ways of pursuing it?

Brandt, Per Aage (2006). “Form and Meaning in Art,” in Mark Turner, (ed.),
The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.

This collection of mostly creative and expressive works in the public domain is a delight. Post after post seems to offer something fresh and wonderful.