Is Art-Science Hogwash ?

: A Rebuttal to Jean-Marc Levy Leblond

La Science n’Est pas L’Art, Jean Marc Levy-Leblond, Hermann Editeurs, Paris 2010 ISBN 978
27056 6954 4

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, Levy-Leblond attacks the emerging Art-Science
movement as fundamentally mistaken and full of false promises. Levy-Leblond is well placed to
make the attack. A physicist and long term editor of Alliage, a prominent French inter-
disciplinary journal, he knows (and loves) the contemporary arts well and he understands the
deep epistemological underpinnings of science.

In a previous review,
http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/apr2011/levy-leblond_mandelbrojt.php

, Leonardo Co-Editor Jacques Mandelbrojt provides a first analysis of Levy Leblond ‘s book
alerting readers to the frontal attack of some of the premises that have been the foundation of the
Leonardo organizations.

Levy-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 re-unite 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. Rather he argues 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 he states, for instance in some discussions of neuro-aesthetics, 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’ no longer is a dominant aesthetic
value, as it often was in the nineteenth century, and that the scientists who explore this terrain a
largely ignorant of the history of art and contemporary practice. In addition in science many very
beautiful ideas or theories in science and mathematics have been proven to be profoundly wrong
by subsequent investigations.

With great relish he attacks the popular fascination with imagery created from fractal
mathematics as ‘techno-kitsch” and their claimed beauty both as art and mathematics. Quoting
the mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, he deconstructs the scientist’s idea of ‘beauty’ rather as a
psychological enlightenment, or awe at the power or efficacy of an idea, when an idea 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 uniting territory between art and science. He
demolishes with gusto the never ending discussions of the applicability of the ‘golden ratio’, and
other over-arching principles in art and science (such as those advocated by E.0.Wilson with his
concept of consilience). Levy-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 they are rather just the use of elaboration of
variations as methodology for developing artistic series of interest.

He lambastes the current fashion for art-science that involves 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 claims that the resulting artworks are
usually poor 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, cognitive and neuro-sciences ( Changeux,
Ramachandran and Zeki not withstanding).

Finally he is devastating on new-media art and the endless techno-gadgetry that many artists are
obsessed with. He dismisses realism in computer arts and the current hype on 3-D systems and
immersion The best he can say is that it’s a time for experimentation and later we will evaluate
( with discussion of how most new technologies have proved culturally sterile, illustrated with the
time it took for photography to embed itself as a serious art medium).

The vitriol of the attack makes one suspect professional jealousy or personal antagonisms. After
all there is a burgeoning art-science professional community of practice, long promoted by the
Leonardo organizations. Centers such as Symbotica in Australia, Arts-Catalyst in London, X-
Node in Zurich, Le Laboratoire in Paris, the Dublin Science Gallery in Dublin, are churning out
art-science work that is shown internationally in galleries and festivals. The European Union, the
French Agence National de la Recherche, The US National Science Foundation and US National
Academy of Science are helping fund and disseminate the products of art-science practice. Can it
really all be hogwash?

Having demolished the work of thousands of art-science practitioners around the planet (and
associated funding agencies), he proceeds to set his own, modest but optimist agenda for the
interactions of the arts and sciences.

For decades Levy Leblond has talked with and thought deeply about the work of contemporary
artists from Francois Morellet, to Piotr Kowalski to Yves Klein, James Turell, Brigitte Nahon, to
Joseph Beuys. He has published numerous texts about the interactions of the arts and sciences in
his journal Alliage. The last third of the book is an articulate, and sometimes poetic, articulation
of why he is deeply committed to what he calls “brief encounters(“breves rencontres”) between
individual scientists and individual artists , or their art works. He is willing to concede, and even
advocate that such “crossings of the paths” can be of benefit both to science and to art. He
therefore encourages such brief encounters, as the personal initiatives of thoughtful scientists, but
resists their institionalisation.
His arguments advocating art-science interaction fall onto two categories: what I would group
under the general category of creativity theory, and second the feeding of the cultural imagination
that helps us make sense, make meaning, of the world around us.

Scientists get their ideas from somewhere, and Levy-Leblond values the “otherness” of the
perspective of artists which forces scientists as a potential source of ‘creative friction”. As a
result he is particularly interested in conceptual arts which involve the embodiment or
instantiation of ideas. Some of the artists, such as in Art Povera, he thinks can help stimulate
scientific thinking. He is averse to the technological arts in general, intrigued by abstract art and
contemporary sculpture. For instance he discussed the work Nahon that for him explores of the
idea of Meta Stability leading him to think about the stability of scientific explanations, or
understanding the underlying connections that make an explanation hang together. He is intrigued
at the way some artists resurrect “archaic’ ideas (for instance the way that nineteenth century
science re appears with the fascination with electromagnetism in the work of some artists today).
He sees the way that artists have used randomness as a sources of creativity, such as Ellsworth
Kelley, as examples of ‘passerelles” or fragile bridges that can connect shared approaches
exploited by both artists and scientists such as “abstraction, simplification, experimentation,
structuring…”.

His second general argument relates on how artists help scientific ideas become cultural re-
appropriated, and then feed back into the imagination of scientists. He argues that it is a
necessity today “to re-establish the link between the concepts constructed by science and the
reality from which they were abstracted”. He calls part of this process “dis-abstraction”, or ‘re-
thickening” a science that runs the danger of becoming esoteric and distant from the very
phenomena that gave rise to it. This thickening, that occurs through the process of translating the
scientific ideas back into cultural arena of the arts leads to a re contextualising with meaning
making, including issues of ethics, by reconnection ideas with experience. Elsewhere I have
called this the process of making science “intimate”. Here he admits, “art can come to the help of
science:.

So does Levy-Leblond succeed in demolishing the ambitions of the growing international art-
science movement; well yes, and maybe, and not at all.

I share with Levy-Leblond his attacks on discussions of beauty, the golden ratio, fractals, the
excesses of neuro-aesthetics and the sometimes disappointing results of artists residencies in
scientific laboratories. Indeed the Wellcome Trust discontinued much of their art-science funding
after a similar evaluation.

I also share with him his horror of a proposed syncretism of art and science in some mish=mash
of a third culture. I don’t believe that inter-disciplinarity is a discipline. I agree that there are very
good intrinsic reasons why the arts and sciences have diverged, independent of cultural or
organizational imperatives. Artists and Scientists may both be trying to makes sense and meaning
out of the world we live in but their underlying epistemologies are distinct.

I of course agree with Leby-Leblond of the value of art-science encounters in the context of
creativity theory and cultural theory.
Where I part ways with Levy-Leblond is the assessment of the importance of the art-science
movement and its potential value both to the science and the emerging planetary culture of the
future. The ambitions for art science interaction that Levy-Leblond advocates are ‘homeopathic’
not “systemic”. There are additional reasons that motivate a more ambitious art-science agenda.
There include rationales through innovation and invention theory, though the need to create new
modes of public engagement in science (such as citizen science) that change the scientific agenda
itself, such as how to couple scientific knowledge to societal change ( for instance to confront
climate change), and even to change the way that the scientific method itself evolves ( as it is
doing as it integrates the methods of complex simulations and new scientific approaches brought
about by the epistemological inversion of ‘big data”. Helga Novotnik has referred to the
development of a ‘socially robust” science . Scientists and engineers have different objectives
and there are good reasons to keep them separate; but there are good reasons also to bring them
together in systemic ways. I think the same is true for artists and scientists.

Finally, it seems to me that Levy-Leblond has a very reduced idea of what the arts are about in
human society today, and their importance to human survival; this selectivity serves his
arugments: he focuses exclusively on the visual arts, ignoring the performance, sound and literary
arts; his examples are all from the closed world of art galleries, and not in popular arts and
culture. He illustrates this reductive view of art with what he outlines as “fundamental
divergences” between scientists and scientists with the following list of dichotomies:

Artists: Personal Activity Scientists: Community Activity

Artsits: Individual Practice
Artists: Self Employed
Artists: External validation
Artists: individual sales
Artists: value of work
0 to millions of euros
Scientists: Collective Practice
Scientists: Employed in Institutions
Scientists: Community Validation (peer review)
(art critics, exhibitions)
Scientists: research contracts/industrial economy
Scientists; millions to billions of euros

I just don’t recognize the emerging art-science community of practice in this description.

Just as he I think rightfully attacks art science arguments from scientists with nineteenth century
ideas of what the arts about, I think he is is choosing to attack the parts of art-science practice that
rely on idea of the fine arts that are specific to the visual fine arts in the last half of the twentieth
century and not the new emerging artforms that cross link to the sciences.

I think that the “brief encounters” between artists and scientists that he advocates rather
should be become “frequent encounters” that change the way that art and science are done in the
emerging century. Rather than viewing art-science as the occasional crossing of fine artists and
fine scientists, the art-science movement is participating in the development emerging
“networked knowledge” culture that systemically identifies and cross links different disciplines
that need, have no choice but to be to be deployed together on topics or issues that must mobilize
both the arts and sciences.

In any case anyone interested in the emerging art-science movement should read this book.