La science n'est pas l'art (review)

Is Art-Science Hogwash? A rebuttal to Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the age-long debate about the connections between the arts and sciences.

In this book, really a diatribe in pamphlet form, Lévy-Leblond attacks the emerging art-science movement as fundamentally mistaken and full of false promises. Lévy-Leblond is well placed to make the attack. A physicist and long-term editor of Alliage, a prominent French interdisciplinary journal, he knows (and loves) the contemporary arts well and understands the deep epistemological underpinnings of science.

Lévy-Leblond attacks art-science on several fronts. First he articulates clearly that art and science have differing goals and ways of evaluating success and that any hope of a "new syncretism" is profoundly misplaced. He thinks that the call for a "third culture" that would reunite the arts and sciences in a common enterprise is hogwash, a romantic nostalgia based on misunderstandings and mis-analysis of intellectual history in both the arts and sciences. He argues, rather, that the interest in art-science interaction arises from the plurality of approaches, the areas of difference and tension and in particular in areas of conceptualization rather than in art-science practice.

He, in my view successfully, dismantles some of the widely discussed areas of art-science convergence.

In some circles, Lévy-Leblond states, for instance in some discussions of neuroaesthetics, beauty is advanced as a transverse ordering principle that applies both in the sciences and the arts. He disputes these arguments, pointing out that in the contemporary arts, "beauty" is no longer is a dominant aesthetic value, as it often was in the 19th century, and that scientists who explore this terrain are largely ignorant of the history of art and contemporary practice. In addition, many very beautiful ideas or theories in science and mathematics have been proven to be profoundly wrong by subsequent investigations.

With great relish, Lévy-Leblond attacks as "techno-kitsch" the popular fascination with imagery created from fractal mathematics and their claimed beauty both as art and mathematics. Quoting the mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, he deconstructs the scientist's idea of "beauty" as psychological enlightenment or awe at the power or efficacy of an idea when it proves to be applicable to a wide range of situations. He quotes Huxley to great effect: "'The grand tragedy of science: the massacre of splendid theories by miserable facts.'"

He attacks the idea that mathematics can be a useful unifying territory between art and science. He demolishes with gusto the never-ending discussions of the applicability of the "Golden Ratio" and of other overarching principles in art and science (such as E.O. Wilson's concept of consilience). Lévy-Leblond has no truck with analysis of Pollock through fractal or complexity theory. He deconstructs the fascination of some artists with mathematics as mistaken elaborations of "signs without meaning" and as merely the methodology for developing artistic series of interest.

He lambastes the current fashion for art-science involving the transposition of scientific phenomena or imagery from the laboratory to the gallery, pointing out (correctly) that the most beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope played absolutely no role in the discoveries made by astronomers using that amazing instrument and claiming that the resulting artworks are usually inferior in their impact compared to the work of the best contemporary artists.

He is ruthless on the claims by some scientists that they can inform art criticism with scientific approaches, whether from experimental aesthetics or the cognitive or neurosciences (Changeux, Ramachandran and Zeki notwithstanding).

Finally, he is devastating on new-media art and the endless techno-gadgetry with which many artists are obsessed. He dismisses realism in computer arts and the current hype about 3D systems and immersion. The best he can say is that it is a time for experimentation that we will evaluate later (he also discusses how...