Art and the New Biology of Mind

On Friday I went to the conference that Eric Kandel was promoting at his book launch. It was held in the Teatro of the Italian Academy at Columbia University. The building was fairly plush, marble staircases, guilt decorative ceilings and red velvet drapes. It promised to be a really exciting day with an exceptionaly impresive line up of speakers from the worlds of science, philosophy and art. Marina Ambramovic, Laurie Anderson, Richard Axel, George Condo, Antonio Damasio, Arthur C. Danto, Lynn Davis, Raymond Dolan, David Freedberg,Vittorio Gallese, April Gornick, Robert Irwin, Neil Jenny, Eric Kandel, Dani Karavan, Calvin Klein, Joseph LeDoux, Margaret Livingstone, Richard Meier, VS.Ramachandran, David Salle, John Snyder, Philip Taaffe, Terry Winters, Semir Zeki.
It was set up so that the scientists gave papers on two themes 1. Emotion and Consciousness and 2. Vision and Aesthetics and a panel of artists were asked to respond to these papers. There were some brilliant papers but it seemed a missed opportunity to really engage with the artists themselves. There was also a certain naivity on the part of the scientists about the nature of art. Many of them were still working to a fairly outmoded and Romantic notion of art as the visualisation of feeling and empathy. As Marina Ambramovic remarked there is far more to contemporary art than these issues, which were related in the examples given, to dead male artists paintings. Arthur Danto also raised the point that there was no discussion of meaning or meaning creation either. If the organisers had asked artists to give papers as well as scientists this may well have been a more fruitful interchange.