Piero Scaruffi's Essays, Analyses and Meditations

Art as the Tool to Communicate Consciousness

Language is a tool for social communication: one individual communicates information to
another individual. This is a fantastic tool (because it duplicates a good, that now exists both in
the speakers and in the listener) but it is not a tool to communicate effectively the most intimate
experience ("what it is like to be me").
Art conveys a different kind of information. By definition, if it were possible to say it in prose,
it would be pointless to play it or rhyme it or sculp it...
Art is about some meaning that cannot be expressed in prose, and there is only one thing that is
"opaque", that i can never possibly know: how it feels to be you.
Art is the tool to communicate the "what it is like to be me" kind of experience.
Art might have originated precisely to communicate this very primitive feeling that cannot be
communicated with language (and probably was even less to communicate with the primitive
languages available thousands of years ago).
Your art makes others feel what it is like to be you.
Musical instruments and chalk were the first "user interfaces"
Art also protected the individual from being shaped by the outside world. By doing art, the
individual could reenact ad libitum his or her true identity.
That, of course, before artists started making art for the sake of art, frequently "cheating" about
their true identity in order to comply with the ruling aesthetic dogmas, movements, schools, etc.

Elitist Art, Unpopular Art and Popular Art

The "greatness" of a work of art is roughly held to be proportional to two factors: insight into
the human condition; skills at the medium that this insight employs.
These two factors are not independent.
Often the most profound truths require skills that most people don't have; if you don't have
those skills, no matter how profound the truth that you discovered, noone else will ever be able
to appreciate it.
Insight benefits greatly from the company of others who have similar insights; and skills benefit
greatly from the company of others who have those skills. This is called "education" (and it is
actually two different kinds of education, one about thinking and the other one about
articulating).
Unfortunately, only an elite acquires the highest education.
Hence the greatest doses of insight are to be found in elitist art.
The voice of the lower classes is not heard in elitist art despite the fact that the low classes
constitute the vast majority of us.
Even the beneficiaries of the greatest art tend to be an elite.
Elitist ("high") art expresses the "truths" discovered by an elite (e.g. of writers) to an elite (of
readers).
There is a world, all that exists outside minds, and that is "reality".
There is also that which exists inside minds and not outside them, "beyond-reality".
A mind not only perceives reality but also "imagines" beyond it.
A creative process called Science discovers, documents and dissects reality.
A creative process called Art has to do with beyond-reality.
Science enables technology.
Technology invents the future of the relationship between mind and reality.
There are several layers of Art, in particular there is "elitist" art (sanctioned by the art
establishment, whether critics, historians, orchestras, museums or literary prizes) and there is
"popular" art (comic strips, Hollywood movies, pop music).
Elitist art is not about beauty but about the insight into the human condition. Elitist art was
sometimes meant as education of the masses (e.g. church music) or realistic description (e.g.
portraiture) but today it is considered high art only if it also provides that insight.
Usually classified within popular art, there is also "unpopular" art (for example, alternative
rock, free jazz and avantgarde music).
Elitist art enables unpopular art.
"Unpopular art" invents the future of the relationship between mind and beyond-reality.
Technology bridges the gap between present and future. Unpopular art bridges a similar gap.
These intermediate levels turn the profound truths discovered by Art and Science into ordinary
lives.

Both technology and unpopular art shed commercial products.

The commercial products that derive from unpopular art constitute popular art.
"Popular science" is not the equivalent of "popular art".
The equivalent of "popular art" would be products such as soft drinks and toothpaste.
Popular culture yields not artistic insight but entertainment.
Products yields not scientific insight but practical usefulness.
Authorship is lost because these products are made in assembly lines, and ultimately it is capital
that decides what deserves to exist and what not.
Science is transient: scientific truth changes all the time as mind keeps discovering new facts
about reality.
Technology is transient: it changes as science changes.
Elitist art is transient too: it changes all the time as mind keeps imagining "beyond-reality".
Unpopular art is transient too: it changes as elitist art changes (and frequently unpopular art
becomes elitist art for later generations).
They are all manifestations of the fact that human culture is fundamentally transient, doomed to
keep changing forever, never achieving a state of equilibrium.
Technology and popular art create mass culture.
Indulging in technology or popular art is a way to avoid "insight" and still benefit from other
people's "insight".
That insight comes with a cost: uncertainty, doubt and anxiety about the ultimate truth, an
elusive truth that is unreachable and that causes reevaluation and, in the end, progress in elitist
culture, i.e. in both Science and Art (progress is a side-effect of the failure to reach the truth).
Mass culture is a way to escape from the psychological suffering that comes with that insight
into the human condition, an escape alternative to the one preached by world religions. Mass
culture is a modern invention to escape from existential anguish.
Mass culture is nonetheless influenced by that "progress", except that progress of elitist culture
is replaced with continuously changing fashion in mass culture.
Public opinion is public ignorance.

A Brief History of Art/ A Theory of the Evolution of Art from Prehistory to

Abstraction
Darwin thought that art could be explained by sexual selection. Ultimately visual art, music and
dance evolved in animals (not only humans) as a way for males to attract females. Art was a
highly competitive function, and sometimes a violent one (sometimes males destroy other the
beautiful artifacts of other males). Therefore males were the first artists/musicians and females
were the first art/music critics.
Later in human civilization it became pointless for men to seduce women with art because other
forms of seduction prevailed (or, simply, arranged marriages).
Leisure, wealth and sexual "abundance" led to using that evolved skill for personal satisfaction.
Meanwhile, women learned the artistic skill from men.
At that point art was almost literally "useless": art is what is useless, otherwise it is technology
or science.
Later, artists tried to convey meaning via art, basically turning art into philosophy, looking for a
meaning to life beyond mere survival and reproduction, using art as a tool to understand the
universe.
Artists wanting to make art socially useful turned it into politics.
Artists wanting to make art industrially useful turned it into design.
In the 20th century art faced one of its own major failures: it failed to find meaning. So it
became a representation of the meaningless: noise in music, abstract forms in the visual arts,
chance in both (randomness being a way to express the serendipity that lies behind most of life,
knowledge and science)
It turns out that noise, abstraction and chance are actually closer to what we observe in nature
than classical art and classical music were.
Now we see art everywhere in both the human and the natural world.
Furthermore, the definition of art expanded as a by-product of political democratization that
makes the leader less heroic and of the scientific revolution that makes god more ubiquitous and
humans less special.

An alternative plot:
Art uses human senses and human hands to propagate and evolve.
The signaler (the arts) and the receiver (the art audience) coevolve.
The beauty we observe in the universe is the real protagonist, and great artists, whether human
or animal, are just a vehicle (one of many) to fulfill that project.

An alternative plot:
The beauty we see in the animal kingdom is actually a form of camouflage. The peacock's tail is

a very visible artifact outside its natural environment but virtually invisible in its natural
(flowery) environment.
Art may have originated simply as a way to create things that are visible to you but not to other
species, i.e. things that camouflage with your environment.

Bibliography:

Charles Darwin: "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871)
Gerald Thayer: "Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom" (1909)
Hugh Cott: "Adaptive Coloration in Animals" (1940)
Helena Cronin: "The Ant and the Peacock - Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to
Today" (1991)
Ellen Dissanayake: "Homo Aestheticus - Where Art Comes From and Why" (1992)
Matt Ridley: "The Red Queen - Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" (1993)
Ellen Dissanayake: "Homo Aestheticus - Where Art Comes From and Why" (1995)
Amotz Zahavi: "The Handicap Principle" (1997)
Nancy Aiken: "The Biological Origins of Art" (1998)
Edward Osborne Wilson: "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge" (1998)
Arthur Danto: "The Abuse of Beauty" (2003)
David Lewis-Williams: "The Mind in the Cave - Consciousness and the Origins of Art" (2004)
Dale Guthrie: "The Nature of Paleolithic Art" (2006)
Iegor Reznikoff: "Music Went With Cave Art In Prehistoric Caves" (2008)
Denis Dutton: "The Art Instinct - Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution" (2010)
David Rothenberg: "Survival of the Beautiful" (2011)

The Real History of Art

We assume that the history of art a smooth continuum but in fact what we mean by "art", and in
fact by "masterpiece", has changed over the centuries because the people deciding what
constitutes art have changed: the Catholic Church decided which artists were worthy of
painting, sculpting and building (we have no memory of the others); then the aristocracy
decided which artists were worthy of decorating their palaces with paintings and sculptures; and
finally the modern world of art relies on definitions that come mainly from art critics, because
they influence what art galleries sell and what art museums acquire, and therefore what will be
remembered.
The perceived value of art depends on the values of the art critic
The artists who do not fit the paradigm of the critics will be ignored by galleries and museums
and presumably patrons
The critic, who decides what is and what is not art, literally invents an artistic era. The critic is,
in a sense, the real creator.
Artists are, in turn, influenced by the artistic era in which they live, the era that has been
"manufactured" by critics
Art becomes merely a vehicle for the aesthetic/ideology of the critics

The Two Sides of Art Histories

The history of any artistic phenomenon is two histories in one: the history of art that represented
its time and the history of art that was ahead of its time.
The artists that matter divide in two groups: icons of their age, and artists that were ahead of
their time.
Icons of their time form the chronicle of what most people saw happen
Artists ahead of their time (variously termed "pioneers, innovators, the vanguard") represent a
completely different aspect of history: the critics/historians discover and offer to the reader
something that most people missed but that was somehow important
The pioneers are viewed by their supporters as more "heroic" than icons: icons were lucky that
what their work resonated with the masses and did not have to struggle against what was
popular (they embodied what was popular).
The emotional attachment to icons tends to be personal too, as people who liked them and still
identify their youth with those icons try to prove (first of all to themselves) that those icons
were "pioneers, innovators, the vanguard" as much as the others.
In science there is no need for such distinction: the hero is the one who is ahead of her/his time,
the discoverer is a discoverer, the inventor is an inventor, regardless of how many people knew
of them at the time when they practiced.
In the humanities critics/historians who hail pioneers over icons are trying to discover the

equivalent of the scientist: it is a transfer of the values of science to the arts.

The Two Sides of Art Histories

The history of any artistic phenomenon is two histories in one: the history of art that represented
its time and the history of art that was ahead of its time.
The artists that matter divide in two groups: icons of their age, and artists that were ahead of
their time.
Icons of their time form the chronicle of what most people saw happen
Artists ahead of their time (variously termed "pioneers, innovators, the vanguard") represent a
completely different aspect of history: the critics/historians discover and offer to the reader
something that most people missed but that was somehow important
The pioneers are viewed by their supporters as more "heroic" than icons: icons were lucky that
what their work resonated with the masses and did not have to struggle against what was
popular (they embodied what was popular).
The emotional attachment to icons tends to be personal too, as people who liked them and still
identify their youth with those icons try to prove (first of all to themselves) that those icons
were "pioneers, innovators, the vanguard" as much as the others.
In science there is no need for such distinction: the hero is the one who is ahead of her/his time,
the discoverer is a discoverer, the inventor is an inventor, regardless of how many people knew
of them at the time when they practiced.
In the humanities critics/historians who hail pioneers over icons are trying to discover the
equivalent of the scientist: it is a transfer of the values of science to the arts.

Art in the Age of Irregularity

Perfect shapes do not exist in nature, only in the human mind.
No behavior is a perfect geometric line. No plant or lake or mountain is a perfect geometric
shape. A straight line is an exception (and, look close enough, it is not so straight after all).
For centuries art was about creating the kind of regularity that only the human mind can
imagine: straight walls, circular bases, cubes, spheres. Even portraits of individuals were
artificially smoothed out so that the features looked as geometric as possible.
The more realistic the painter tried to be, the more it had to deviate from the ideal of beauty.
Photography might have accelerated the process by introducing a competitor to the portrait, a
competitor that shows all the imperfections of the human skin.
Whatever the cause, art became more and more chaotic and dissonant, and artists came to value
irregularity more than regularity.

Digital Interactive Art

The Web has created the social equivalent of Brownian motion, in which countless people get in
touch with countless people. Because of physical limits to what a person can possibly do in the

social sphere, this Brownian motion (technically speaking, a nonlinear system) is permeated
with randomness: which action will be more inflential on a person's future depends on which
pieces of information that person extracts from the flux, which is largely a random factor.
Serendipity has always been important, but now it has become so pervasive that one should try
and maximize the outcome of serendipity. Businesses are developing "pull" models that
basically aim at harnessing resources outside the organization. Digital artists are letting the
"users" of their installation define what the "art" is. Digital artists are becoming mere providers
of interactive platforms who let the art emerge from the actions of the users of that platform.
The platform is merely an "instrument" that the user can play. Just like any instrument the
platform provides both the tool and the constraint: the tool enables some actions, but at the same
time does not allow other actions.
Indirectly, this is a way to democratize the interaction of people with the tools of art. Continuing
the parallel with musical instruments, the user who plays with an artist's interactive installation
becomes a composer. This process de facto removes virtuoso talent from the equation: the talent
that one needs is simply imagination.
The experience is also expanded to the whole body because technology allows for sensing any
body movement. It's not just the fingers who play the piano, but the whole body that is sensed
by the interactive installation and that therefore "plays" the interactive installation.
Inevitably, this process of art-making by the user becomes a process of discovery. First of all,
the user has to discover the interactive platform, just like it would discover the environment.
Secondly, the user can use the interactive platform as tool to discover her own power of
imagination, with all the psychological consequences that go with it.
Increasingly, the spectator is the user of a high-tech device. This confers even more power to the
spectator in this process of discovery, but, more importantly, it moves the action of art-making
to the same level of web-surfing and social networking.
The user is the same person who has spent hours selecting webpages, friends, tweets, photos,
videos. Every Facebook and Twitter user is de facto a curator of her own "exhibition" in the vast
museum of all possible contents. Curating one's online experience is a way of dealing with
serendipity: the tweets that one will see are still largely random (because it is physically
impossible to check all of them), but the user/curator can at least increase the chances of seeing
some. The curator is also an advisor to other curators, because the equivalent of "word of
mouth" exists on the Web (e.g., Facebook's "Like" button) and often determines what one
curator decides to see.
Therefore, the user of a digital interactive installation is a curator (by definition of 21st century
individual) who also becomes a participant in the creation of art.
So far the artists have mostly focused on providing the kind of interactive experience that more
closely resembles childplay. In fact, an installation is often judged by how much "fun" it
generates in the users, rather than, say, by how much it makes them think about serious issues.
This is probably a consequence of having empowered the user to become a curator: an artist
wants to amuse the user the same way it would court an influential museum curator in the world

of brick and mortar.

Hopefully this will result in the death of the museum. It is appalling that museums are trying to
incorporate even digital art.
A museum is a horrible place, a graveyard of human civilization. The head of a Greek statue in
a faraway museum has no artistic or historical value, other than being a tribute to large-scale
theft by imperial powers. The artifacts moved to a museum lose the meaning that they had in
their original environment. Museums are just very boring places for most people because it is
very boring to browse the loot stored in some huge warehouses.
It is appalling that, in the age in which the entire web is a living museum, the traditional
museums are already thinking how to "preserve" digital art, i.e. how to steal it from its original
context and place it into a boring room of a huge building that you can access only when the
bureaucracy keeps it open and only upon paying a ticket.

The Asymmetry Between Artists and Scientists

The separation of science and art also follows from the different ways that the two are practiced
in modern society.
Most scientists are salaried employees.
Most artists are "self-employed".
Both situations introduce some "noise" in their creative life.
Salaried employees are concerned with the bureaucracy they work for and its rules (in
particular, for promotion).
Small businesses are concerned with delivering a product that sells (in particular, with
marketing).
Both are stimulated to innovate, but one has to innovate within a bureaucracy (the research
laboratory) that rewards innovation whereas the other has to innovate within a free market (the
art market) that rewards innovation.
Therefore the relationship between art and science cannot be symmetric. Artists need inspiration
from anything in order to innovate. Scientists only need inspiration from within their
bureaucracy.
Artists are interested in learning about science. Scientists have little to gain from learning about
art: it is not required by their bureaucracy in order for them to progress within it.

The Meaning of Art

The value of art depends on the values of the art critic.

Most art is born as imitation, not innovation.
The critic, not the artist, is the one who defines innovation, and rates it.
The artist is merely a vehicle for the aesthetic/ideology of the critic.
The critic is the real artist.

The Separation of Art and Science

To some extent, every human activity is a form of Art. Then we have to decide to what degree it
is "artistic". Every human action can be viewed as an act of creation. With its every action the
human mind tries to recreate the world in her/his image. Each mind does it differently because
each mind is different.
Needless to say, the existence of millions of different views of the world would make life very
difficult. No surprise then that society has actually evolved away from the arts and towards a
uniform view of the world. Children have a very hard time abandoning their egocentric view of
the world. Society forces them, and keeps forcing daily every adult, to accept a universal view
of the world that we can share and use. No wonder that we have separated the arts from the
sciences: the arts are an obstacle to that process of social coexistence. Art is the process of
creating a very personal view of the world. Science is the process of creating a very impersonal
view of the world. The latter has helped create more and more complex forms of society. The
price that society had to pay was to marginalize and isolate the arts.
Art is ubiquitous in Nature, whether a beaver's dam or a spider web. We doubt that other
animals meant to produce the Art that they produced, and that is the fundamental difference
between our Art and their Art. They (presumably) don't perceive what they do as Art. We
assume that an alpine lake or the mountain ridges that create it do not perceive themselves,
therefore they are not "artists". A spider cannot appreciate the quality of the web it has just
woven, a beaver cannot appreciate the quality of the "dam" that it has just built across a creek.
However, whether animals can perceive beauty or not, their activities look "artistic" too. Thus,
in the end, "art" is simply a different name for... life.
A skeptical physicist asked me "what do Art and Science have in common?" My answer: "They
both come from the same mind". I actually believe that Art came first: Science is an evolution
of Art.
There is a reason if humans engage in artistic activities. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (if
the development of the individual from childhood to adulthood mirrors the progression of the
human species through ancestral stages), then children hold the answer. Children play. Most
adults stop playing because they were told to stop playing. Art might be a way to keep playing
even after we are told to stop playing. Children are genetically programmed to play, and the act
of playing might be a way to learn the environment and to be creative about it. Humans may

just be genetically programmed to be creative. Art might just be a way to map the environment
in a creative way. Being creative about interacting with the environment yields several
evolutionary benefits: 1. you learn more about the environment, 2. you simulate a variety of
strategies, 3. you are better prepared to cope with frequently changing conditions.
Mapping the territory is a precondition for surviving its challenges, but it wouldn't be enough to
yield solutions to unpredictable problems. To deal with the unpredictable, we need more than
just a map. Over the centuries this continuous training in creativity has led to the creation of
entire civilizations (science, technology, engineering). And to the history of Art.
The impact on society of Art is that art educates people to be creative. Art creates new
paradigms of thought. When Art and Science do not interact, every new generation is more
similar to specialized robots than to sentient beings.
The benefit for Science of an integration with the arts is that Art can help usher in a paradigm
shift. Major scientific revolutions have usually coincided with major artistic periods. Today
science tends to be "evolution", not "revolution", perhaps because it has been decoupled from
the arts.
The fictitious separation of Art and Technology/Science is a recent phenomenon. It was not
obvious to the Sumerians that the ziggurat was only art, or to the Egyptians that the pyramid
was only art, or to the Romans that the equestrian statue was only art. They had, first and
foremost, a practical purpose. Given that purpose, a technology was employed to achieve it. Art
and Science have shifted so far apart in the 21st century because we live in the age of
specialization. Specialization as we know it today started in the European Middle Ages and
picked up speed with the Industrial Revolution. Specialization is, quite simply, a very efficient
way to organize society. Therefore specializations multiplied. Today we are not only keeping
Art and Science separated: we are maintaining countless specializations within the arts and
within the sciences.
The language of Science has become more and more difficult because it has been left largely to
scientists to talk about Science. The more isolated Science is, the more difficult its language
becomes for non-scientists. The more difficult the language, the more isolated Science becomes.
The consequences of the separation of Art and Science are sometimes subtle but widespread.
For example, environmental fundamentalists oppose any alteration of Nature. Implicitly, they
assume that humans cannot improve over Nature. This idea would have been ridiculous in
ancient times, when human alterations of Nature were almost always greeted as positive
improvements to the landscape. Even the staunchest environmentalists would probably refrain
from destroying the pyramids or the ziggurats or the Acropolis of Athens to restore the stones to
the mountains where they were taken, and would probably refrain from demolishing
Michelangelo's statues to return the marble to Carrara's mountain. However, the environmental
fundamentalist of the 21st century assumes that Nature is the supreme artist, and humans should
not alter whatever Nature has produced. If Michelangelo and Leonardo were reborn today and
submitted a plan to build a fantastic freeway through a national park, they would be banned.
(Ironically, the same environmental fundamentalists who oppose bridges and tunnels take

pictures precisely of bridges and tunnels when they vacation in Switzerland). This was clearly
not the case centuries ago, when great minds were specifically hired to alter the environment.
What has changed is the view that human work is beautiful. The demise of this view is a
consequence of having decoupled Art and Science. The 21st century does not perceive a
scientific, technological, engineering project as beautiful. It perceives it as a threat to (natural)
beauty.
The separation of Art and Science was part of a broader trend away from unification and
towards specialization. Not only did Science and Art progressively move apart, but disciplines
within them kept moving apart from each other. For example, each scientific discipline became
more and more specialized. A continuum of knowledge and of human activity was broken down
into a set of discrete units, each neatly separated from its neighbors. This happened for a simple
reason: it worked. Humans were able to build large-scale societies thanks to the partitioning of
labor and of knowledge. As knowledge grew, it would have been impossible to maintain the
ancient continuum of knowledge. It was feasible, on the other hand, to muster the increasing
amount of knowledge once it was broken down into discrete units and handed down to
"specialists". The gap between Art and Science, and the gaps between all artistic and scientific
disciplines, kept increasing for the simple reason that the discrete space of specialized
disciplines was more manageable than the old continuum of total knowledge.
The digital age is providing us with an opportunity to rebuild the continuum: the world-wide
web, digital media and communications have enabled an unprecedented degree of exchange,
interaction, integration, convergence and blending. We are finally able again to see the
continuum again and not just the discrete space. The new continuum, though, bears little
resemblance to the old one, in that its context is a knowledge-intensive society that is the exact
opposite of the knowledge-deprived society of the ancient continuum.