Welcome to the "Dark Side."

Scheming evil genius Brain (of Pinky & The Brain) spoofs Orson Welles' charismatic but deadly dishonest villain in The Third Man.*

 I asked for researchers to take a frank look at creativity and art a few months ago and it seems some "creativity researchers" have granted my wish. Please go read "The Dark Side of Creativity" by Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD over at Huffington Post.

These researchers found a correlation between creativity and dishonesty, so they designed a few more types of studies that would test the two in different ways and they continued to find the same correlation. I can point out what I think are some flaws in each of their studies but I thought they did a decent job of approaching the problem from a few different angles. Kaufman, reporting on the studies, names Bernie Madoff as an example of a creative and dishonest person. Commenter 'Bibulus' writes, "Newt Gingrich must be some sort of da Vinci," while commenter 'Pogo Bock' quips, "Well, that explains advertisin­g."

Jafar and Iago from Disney's Aladdin. Nearly everyone in the movie was wildly creative-- and dishonest. Except the sultan, a remarkably uncreative thinker who was actively trying to force his daughter into marriage and ignoring the seething masses of his starving subjects while living in a palace, who was portrayed by Disney as an honest man.

It was a relief to read something that doesn't glorify creativity. Usually it's portrayed as magical and fairy-like, an "inner child" of a liberated few, illustrated with multicolored hand-prints and "joyous" abstracted dancing figures. My guess is this happens because the Arts are always pandering for money. This imagery and narrative apparently appeals to the wealthy, so there you have it. Some people really don't get that the arts are worthwhile until you inundate them those sorts of commercials shown on National Public Television with the leaping multiracial children and bounding classical music. Apparently this is what we look like to those outside of the Art World.

But the commenters on HuffPo were not so pleased. Besides the two I quoted above (and with the exception of one or two high-strung religious wackos), most everyone was a writer, graphic designer, or some other creative type who was outraged that this sort of attack on creativity would be funded, studied and reported upon.

Heath Ledger as The Joker. I never really understood the character until Heath Ledger played him. In the cartoon and Jack Nicholson iterations he never did seem very funny, he just did humor-themed things, and he usually just tried to poison people over and over. His special villain-trait seemed to be creativity plus a clown fetish, basically. Heath Ledger's Joker's evocation of the chaotic nihilist nature of the Joke was ingenious.

Creativity, as I see it, is a neutral human trait, not an inherently positive one. You can apply creativity toward dishonesty or toward perfectly honest endeavors. You can also be a very inside-the-box thinker when it comes to both honesty and dishonesty.

This brings me to the definition of "dishonesty." Honesty, in terms of being a moral person, is mostly defined as acting in accordance with the common morals that one's society deems acceptable. But much of the dishonesty practiced by inside-the-box lock-step thinkers (or creative thinkers during uncreative moments) actually passes as "common sense," though not all common sense is dishonest. I believe credit card companies and collections agencies are dishonest, at least the more egregious ways they behave in recent years. Yet U.S. society more or less accepts that they are an ok part of an ok economic system. So one could put in an "honest" day's work as CEO of a credit card company that basically steals people's money.

This would be an example of uncreative dishonesty that would not stand out as dishonesty to many observers because it's not outside-the-box behavior. I think this lock-step uncreative mentality allows this society to get away with collectively telling some whoppers like, "racism and sexism were terrible, but they no longer exist today!" or "poor people just don't understand hard work or they'd be richer," or "abstinence education works" or "we're fighting for freedom-- money has nothing to do with it," or "it's ok to kill people in these circumstances," or everyone's adamant belief that their parents have never had sex, ever. A solid majority of people engage in at least some of these dishonest ideas and practices and do not stand out as particularly dishonest people because they're not creatively dishonest.

*You may have noticed I've illustrated this post using only fictional characters who are creative and dishonest. That's because they were all invented by artists. Even though creative types turned out in droves to whine in the comments about the study casting creativity in a bad light, clearly the "creative evildoer" is beloved by artists.

Oxford Researchers Note Trees, Miss Forest

I've read some pretty poorly designed research regarding art in my time-- or possibly merely poor reporting of valid research, or poor reporting on poor research-- but of those turds this one is pretty steamy.

According to The Telegraph researchers conducted brain scans on people while they showed them portraits by Rembrandt (prints or actual paintings were not specified). Some viewers were told the portraits were fakes, some were told they were "real." People generally reacted to the "real" ones using the same part of their brains that appreciates pleasure, like food and gambling. When people were told the paintings were fakes they scrutinized the picture to try to see why scholars regarded them as such.

Interesting premise, right? According to Nadia Khomami, who wrote the short article, the study ..."suggests that when we make aesthetic judgements on things like art, we are influenced by many different parts our brain- including what others have told us." So far so good.  And then:

Professor Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, and one of the conductors of the experiment said: “It is always better to think we are seeing the genuine article. Our study shows that the way we view art is not rational, that even when we cannot distinguish between two works, the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently. [...]The fact that people travel to galleries around the world to see an original painting suggests that this conclusion is reasonable.”

 Not quite, sir. Let me explain:

Behold! the electronic device you are using to view this blog post. It's pretty neat, right? Now what if I told you it was manufactured by highly trained monkeys? Does that change the way you feel about the device? Would you stop and examine it? Or: think of a song you like. Now what if I told you the songwriter was trained not as a rock musician but in traditional Japanese opera? Would you go back and listen to that song, examining it for the Japanese influence? People have sort of similar reactions to the information that Alicia Keys and Tori Amos were classically trained. Guess what? Your appreciation of something has been altered by "what others have told us."

But then the researchers added art and authenticity to the mix, along with all the classist, Eurocentric, elitist social baggage that comes along with it. We are a society where people are not generally well educated in art except the privileged few who attend universities, a society where art is generally seen as a hobby for a wealthy elite, where galleries and museums are associated with intimidation and snobbery. Where venturing an opinion about art is, frankly, terrifying. Moreover the general art world has spent the last three or four centuries spreading the myth that art is a magical phenomenon of powerful genius. The same art world that has built up a mythology of the Original (and just so happens to benefit financially from such an attitude). So perhaps-- just perhaps-- the enjoyment of a pretty painting is cut short when the viewer is presented with these pressures?

Or perhaps the act of examination versus pleasure-center appreciation is not a "better" or worse proposition. The researchers or writer did not mention if the part of the brain used to examine a fake painting is the part of the brain reserved for stuff that sucks.

Wouldn't it have been interesting to examine the idea that "the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently," by designing an experiment where similar obscure paintings are shown in a neutral fashion, some by artists the viewer will not recognize and others by, say, Mondrian? When you remove the real/fake better/worse premise I wonder, people will react to unrecognizable artists using the pleasure center referred to above? Or upon hearing that the art is the early work of a famous artist, will the examination process kick in?

And to address the last bit of the remark, about visiting galleries to see the originals, that is a misleading analogy. The reproductions to which we are accustomed are not similar paintings or drawings that we can view three-dimensionally; they are photographs of the work, usually printed in a completely different size, on flat shiny paper. Originals can sometimes look the same as their reproductions but they tend to look different and can actually be quite surprising in person, therefore you have to visit museums to observe the materiality, the brushstrokes, the size, sculptural angles, etc. It's not just an attitude toward the authenticity of the piece, it is an observable difference.

To compound the wrongness of this article it is titled, Our Brains Respond Differently to 'Fake' Art. As if to imply that it is the fakeness of the art which causes a chemical reaction due to its sheer inferiority, like magic, as opposed our attitudes being swayed by social pressures related to the authenticity of art.

I'm not holding my breath for Science and/or Research to approach art from a rational place of deeper understanding. Judging by the heaps of either smug or starry-eyed research, science-related people seem to take particular pleasure in debunking (and sometimes confirming) the elitist magical thinking that surrounds art (and fine wine), probably because they've bought into such thinking in the first place.

Sheldon and Leonard from The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon has an Idea; you can tel because he's pointing at his head. Leonard responds like a sad sack.

"Proust Was a Neuroscientist," says a neuroscientist.

I'm right in the middle of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer, and it's good timing too because I just read an Art in America article called "Science & Art I" which plays off of Lehrer nicely (more about that in another post). Proust examines the work of writers Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, George Elliot, Walt Whitman, painter Paul Cezanne, composer Igor Stravinsky and chef Escoffier through the eye of a neuroscientist and points out how, according to Lehrer, their work anticipated recent discoveries in neuroscience by decades. Yeah... there are a TON of problems with this premise, and even though I'm just itching to slam every aspect of the book on this blog, I admit that the whole reason I'm so worked up about it is that Proust is a highly original (not to say unprecedented), enthusiastic, and very weird project. The book was recommended to me through a scientist who is so smart it's hard to believe I actually know her, but I had it in for Lehrer before I even started. I was most recently subjected to the influence of art upon science, and vice verse, through the psychadelic musings of boys at college parties who try to impress freshmen girls with their deep thoughts and artistic passion. So what else can art + science do besides get you laid? According to Lehrer, they are two building blocks for examining our experience; and explaining WHY reality feels the way it does (the realm of science) must begin with an in-depth investigation of how reality actually feels (the realm of art). My problem with this attitude (which is, in itself, a correct, useful assumption) is the linear, scientific thinking of the author, as if every human endeavor is a step-by-step process to get from A to B, and every step that takes us closer to B is progress, and therefore morally better and truer than every step that came before. Every artist, every era has its own opinions but in my view art runs in circles; it regurgitates, zigzags, spins its wheels. Alernately art paves the way for science; it is science; it uses science, it mimics science, it rejects science. And this is possible, not only because art is such a patchwork of different motives and practices, but because science is as well. Humanity and nature are made absolutely the way they are; but art and science are both roundabout, imperfect ways that humanity came up with to deal with an absolute nature. Argue with me if you want (please do) but I don't think there IS a point A or B.

Some critics were upset that Lehrer viewed the arts only in terms of how they have informed science, arguing that this devalues the arts and misses the point of art. I don't see any problem with it, though; sifting through art history with a scientific filter is really no different than the Guerilla Girls' rewriting of art history from a type of feminist perspective or the Freudian reinterpretation of art (whose heyday is not yet over outside of Acadaemia).

Lehrer obviously knows that he's cherry-picking from a vast universe of possible meaning, right? I mean, he's a smart guy... he has to know there are no clear and simple answers or conclusions when it comes to art. Until you arrive at the essay on Cezanne, where he sums up artistic progress: "This is why the impressionists feel modern, while Delacroix and Ingres and Bouguereau do not: they realized the painter did not simply have a subject that he or she was duty bound to represent. The painter was an artist, and artists had ideas that they were compelled to express." (gee, if only Delacroix had had ideas and realized he were an artist). Or, "Cezanne invented postimpressionism because the impressionists simply weren't strange enough." Lehrer continuously uses the word "invent," giving a very false impression of one man suddenly creating a whole, complete modernism, or a complete whatever, by himself. He also repeatedly refers to Cezanne's paintings as "abstract," then in the next sentence marvels at how the subject is so recognizable and accurate. The way he tramples the language of art criticism and art history is remarkably similar to the way artists steal and misuse scientific language: describing a process in terms of evolution; glancing quickly over an article describing an article that explains the theory of relativity, then translating it with poetic license; and, most irritatingly, replacing useful descriptors like, "diligent," "two-sided," "multifaceted" or "lively," with psychiatric terms such as "O.C.D.," "bipolar," "schizophrenic," or "A.D.D." (notice how they always use the cool mental illnesses; no one ever gets up to defend their stuff in crit, points to their trendily primitive drawing, and says, "it's an almost mentally retarded kind of gesture.")

What's more, Lehrer always writes about the painters who are one step ahead in the "progress" of painting in a positive light while the painters who are "behind" are belittled. So he brushes aside Delacroix, Bouguereau (understandable) and Ingres to make way for the "motley group of young [Impressionists who] decided to rebel." They "invented the idea of painterly abstraction. ...They had broken with the staid traditions of academic realism." But once the art historical narrative progresses to Cezanne superceding the Impressionists Lehrer derides the "pretty paintings of Renoir and Degas" and as Cezanne was "freeing the artist from the strict limits of verisimilitude, impressionism was destined to go places those water lilies could never have imagined."

It wasn't always this way. When I first opened Proust and began the essay on Walt Whitman and how mind/emotion/spirit and body are one and how emotions arise from the body as well as mind, I was completely enchanted. Maybe, looking back, it's because I don't know a lot about literature beyond geekily enthusiastic participation in English class; I like it and I can really get into it, but when it comes to really getting the hard stuff, I have to have it completely spelled out for me in an attractive way for it to really click. And Lehrer spelled out Leaves of Grass in a very attractive way. He obviously knows more about literature than visual art; he doesn't speak with blind reverance of writing books as the making of a miracle of independant genius, like he does with Cezanne. His Whitman essay is more a play of ideas from multiple disciplines than a struggle to simply understand and explain the work at hand. He seems comfortable enough to tease his subjects a little, to play with ideas, which make the essays on the writers (so far I've only read the ones on Whitman, Elliot, and Proust) very enjoyable. I never knew that Whitman was a nurse in a Civil War hospital who was involved with the discovery of phantom limb sensation in amputees (a biographical detail that enlightens the poetic/neuroscientific link). Here the entire premise of reexamining literature through modern neuroscience works at its best; I saw Whitman's work in a new light. When I read his work and his biographical blurb in the histories of literature he is always pigeonholed; his work, chosen selectively alongside Melville and Twain, is used as a tool leading the way to a broader understanding of transcendentalism and sexuality of his time. I've never seen it with any other emphasis until Proust.

People are complaining left and right about his tenuous connections between literature and neuroscience in his essays on Elliot and Woolf; how he has fit their round peg of art into the square hole of his personal scientific theory (sorry, I couldn't come up with another metaphor). But seriously, what art critic or historian doesn't lift what they like from the pages or canvas and hold it to the light of whatever personal ideas they may concoct? Honestly, I can't comment on these essays because I don't know the work of Woolf and Elliot very well. But this book will definitely make me run out and read their work; I'm already reading Woolf's Orlando and enjoying it. Lehrer's biography for Elliot was particularly absorbing; rarely do I read about a woman artist who is described with relish as admirably ugly or more than a sponge for the male intellect of their time.

All in all, I guess... I'm glad I'm reading this book. Lehrer has raised both my awareness and my blood pressure.