Letters

Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 79-80, 1983 Printed in Great Britain oO24-O94X/83/0IoO79-02%03.oO/O Pergamon Press Ltd. LETTERS Readers’commentsare welcomed on textspublishedin Leonardo. TheEditors reserve the right to shortenletters. Letters should be written in English. LEONARD0 AND THE FUTURE I am very pleased indeed to hear aboutLeonardo’scontinuation. In my life as an artist and writer Leonardo is the great publishing event. At the Polytechnicof North London we have all the issuesbound permanently for reference.Such isits importance; Leonardo’sfuture should now beof even greater importance with 15years of theyounger generation waiting for you to give them guidance, facts and analyses-of the subject for what it is: art, scienceand technology. At the PolytechnicLeonardo has been to all intents and purposes a younger generation “United Nations”-please keep it as international as is possible within your means. I shall support this concept as long as I am able. Albert Garrett I0 SunningdaleAve. Eastcore, Ruislip MiddlesexHA4 9SR. England ON THE IDEA OF ORDER IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES AND IN THE VISUAL ARTS Giorgio Careri tells us (Leonardo 15, 19 (1982)) that ‘to understand means to produce a kind of order’; and that ‘to think meanstoestablish order’; and that the construction of what hecalls‘signs’(i.e. ‘a mark or a collectionof marks that signifiessome thing either by resemblanceor by convention’) is the means by which order is both made and, under favourable conditions, the means by which ‘one can reach a consensus about the order among members of a society’. So far so good. The recognition of order and communication about order are (to put it crude1y)epistemicactivities of representation. How, then, shall order in art and in sciencebe distinguished?Professor Careri seems to me to make two subtly related and mistaken sorties in the direction of an answer. 1. He tells us that there is an aesthetic order detectable in (at least some) art works. But if this is so,doesn’t it follow that if this order is to be significantly apprehended (recognized as aesthetically orderly) it must in its turn be represented by a ‘sign’? And why should not these representational apprehensions (‘signs’) themselves have aesthetic order? If so, how shall this be recognized? And so on, infinitely. ... 2. Professor Careri tells us that ‘In art one deals with a personal collection of nonverbal data, the price to be paid for confronting alone the complexities of reality that can only offer subjective impressions.’ His suggestion seems to be that the aesthetically orderly ‘signs’ generated by artists are not of a kind such that even under the most favourable conditions ‘one can reach a consensus about the order among members of a society’ about their use. But if the artist cannot in principle expect to share the meaningful use of a ‘sign’ with any other person, how can he expect to share it even with himself, on another occasion? What sort of ‘sign’ can it be that has no regular communicative potential whatsoever? The two ideas, that art is essentiallyaesthetic and that it is essentially subjective,are not new and have not been fruitful. Had we not better abandon them and interpret art, like science,epistemically-as asearch for new and better models of the world? It will by no means in that case prove impossible to distinguish art from science, in ways such as I have myself attempted in my article Order in Art and Science(Leonardo 15, 208 (1982)). Donald Brook Professor o f Visual Arts Flinders Universityof South Australia Bedford Park 5042 Australia SIZE CONSTANCY,TERRY POPE’S GLASSES, AND THE MOON ILLUSION David W. Brisson’s description of the effect of the mirrored glasses designed by Terry Pope is highly interesting (Leonardo15, 205 (1982)). However, I can see no basis for hisconclusion that ‘it is ...clearfrom the effect of Pope’s glasses that our sense of metric space is learned’. If our sense of space were learned, how could glassesproduce a new, coherent sense of space spontaneously?The design of glassespresents the wearer with the view that he would receive if the separation between his eyes were greatly increased (as it would be if his head increased...