Art and aesthetics: challenges for neuroscience B Conway |
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Neuroscience Program, Wellesley College, Wellesley & Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
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| Works of art are the product of the complex neural machinery that translates physical light signals into behavior, experience and emotion. The brain mechanisms responsible for vision and perception have been sculpted during evolution, and further modified by cultural exposure and development. Recent developments in neuroscience have come tantalizingly close to tackling long-standing questions of aesthetics. In my presentation, I will consider what questions this new field is poised to answer, and will attempt to underscore the substantial differences between beauty, art and perception, terms often conflated by “aesthetics”. Although I will touch upon adjacent fields of neuroscience such as sensation, perception, attention, reward, learning, memory, emotions, and decision making, where discoveries will likely be informative, the bulk of my presentation will focus on a close examination of artists’ paintings and practices, representing a return to the original definition of aesthetics (sensory knowledge). This examination aims to achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture, sidestepping the thorny issues of what constitutes beauty. In particular, I will address color contrast, which poses a challenge for artists: a mark situated on an otherwise blank canvas will appear a different color in the context of the finished painting. How do artists account for this change in color during the production of a painting? In the broader context of neural and philosophical considerations of color, I discuss the practices of several modern masters, including Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Milton Avery, and suggest that the strategies they developed not only capitalized on the neural mechanisms of color, but also influenced the trajectory of western art history. |
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