Normal Art vs. Revolutions

What do we learn if we look at art the way Kuhn looked at science?

Thomas Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in the year that I was born, so I know at a personal level that the book has been around for many decades. In that time, I have not learned of any compelling alternative theory that has emerged to explain the nature of the scientific process. It still seems reasonable to distinguish between what Kuhn calls “normal science” and the occasional paradigm-shifting “revolution.” In Kuhn’s perspective, scientists don’t seek out revolution; instead, it’s forced on them by the breakdown of a paradigm or framing used by normal science.

Applying Kuhn’s ideas to art gives a novel and arguably useful perspective on why some artists matter more than others. Of course, the application of those ideas isn’t straightforward; we have to spend a little time working through some similarities and differences between how artists work and how scientists work.

Is art like science?

Much of what artists do can be understood as “normal art.” There's nothing wrong with Kuhn’s normal science, and there's correspondingly nothing wrong with normal art. In both cases, the significance of the work depends at least partly on idiosyncrasies of who is looking.

The scientific endeavor is largely the accumulation of possibly interesting facts about many different things in the universe, and it’s hard to make a case that any particular one of those facts is especially important. What makes something “interesting” is very much in the eye of the beholder. For example, I am not personally very interested in the stress hormones of lizards, but I can respect a colleague who has spent their entire career on that subject. Likewise, I don't expect that same colleague to be especially interested in my work on aspects of security and performance in distributed computer systems. In normal science, we can pursue our separate interests independently, and all is well.

We could say that something similar happens in art. In the same way that we can identify a community of interest for a scientist, there is some community of interest for an artist that constitutes their audience. That audience may be large or small. Artists do their “experiments,” which we might consider to be investigations of (1) how the artist sees, (2) how the artist processes what they see, and (3) how the artist renders what they've seen. (I should note that this exploration is in terms of the visual arts, but a similar analysis likely applies to the performing arts as well.)

Of course, neither artists nor scientists are doing their work primarily for an audience. The deeper motivation in both cases seems to be an internal sense of exploration, an almost compulsive curiosity. However, what happens publicly in interacting with the community is more amenable to analysis than what is happening in an individual’s mind.

Normal art thus consists of problem solving and/or puzzle making, but within a realm whose boundaries are already understood. Producing a new picture may be interesting, and perhaps even delightful, for the artist and for some or all of their audience. The picture may represent important learnings for them all, but that is not the same as saying that it challenges the paradigm in which that artist has been working, or in which other artists have been working.

Influence and originality

In science, we could say that work is exciting, relevant and important to roughly the extent that the work serves as a basis for further work by others. Using the same framework, we might say something similar about art. However, one tricky part of this analogy is that artists do not usually explicitly cite prior work. Artists and art critics are interested in influences between artists, but even the most self-aware artist is typically less careful about enumerating all such connections than what would be required by scientific norms.  

In addition, there is an artistic concern with originality that is rather different from a scientific concern with originality. As has been famously noted in literary criticism, there is sometimes an identifiable “anxiety of influence.” The artist may scrupulously avoid reference to their influences, lest they be seen as unoriginal. In principle, a cunning and diligent critic can identify such patterns and unearth the hidden influences; but such an approach is all much more involved than what is supposed to happen in science. Scientists can likewise be mediocre imitators of others who are genuinely original. However, there is a rough consensus in science that to hide one’s dependence on significant predecessors is actually a form of professional malpractice. In contrast, there is little if any professional consequence to an artist denying alleged connections or dependencies perceptible in their work.

We can also see in this analogy how a person can be an “excellent artist” in terms of their participation in normal art, but nevertheless feel like an embittered failure who does not receive recognition and attention from the art world. This scenario is not so different in its way from what happens to people who are capable researchers, but not brilliant ones. They can do their work alongside their brilliant colleagues, but there is something missing.

When we consider the kind of science that leads to Nobel prizes, we find that the awards are given to work that has spawned many different kinds of follow-on work of substantial importance, often affecting everyday life in some way. It is a little tricky to make the same kind of claim for art, although it does seem as though the art that attracts the most attention and the highest prices is important in a similar kind of foundational way.

Unique artifacts

However, in art there is the odd problem that the foundational nature of the art is conflated with its unique identity as a one-of-a-kind object. In contrast, there is no scarcity value associated with a scientific paper: in general, no one is particularly interested in the exact manuscript in which some breakthrough is expressed.

This issue of the “unique artifact” contrasting with the “generic copy” is worth examining in more detail. In some ways, we have the tools today to land anywhere we want on the spectrum from unique valuable object to generic copy. Digital technologies of scanning and printing (both 2-D and 3-D) give many ways to reproduce an artifact. In addition, if we want to fight against reproduction, there are ways in which one can construct an artifact so that it’s difficult or impossible to reproduce.

One conspicuous example of such an approach is found in non-fungible tokens (NFTs). An NFT is effectively an artificially-unique object that is associated with readily-reproduced content. In one famous example, the readily-reproduced digital collage "Everydays - The First 5000 Days" by Beeple was sold as an NFT by Christie’s for $69m. The collage itself is available to everyone, but the particular file packaged on the blockchain is not – it has a particular owner, and as with a physical painting it can be transferred but not duplicated.

Benjamin and “aura”

Since the time of Walter Benjamin's essay on “The artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction,” thinkers have grappled with the question of what an artwork is if it can be readily reproduced. Benjamin argued that an original had an “aura” that was distinct from what could be discerned in any copy. Today we are concerned not only with the effect of photography, which in Benjamin's time made it possible for images to be created mechanically and apparently without the artist's intervention. Our additional concern is with the overall digitization of the universe, and what it means for the construction and reproduction of artifacts altogether.

For example, what is the point of actually fabricating something by hand in the modern world? Sometimes, there is an intentional introduction of errors that show the maker’s involvement. For example, some handmade rugs come from countries where the local observance of Islam includes deliberate violations of the rug’s pattern, to clearly distinguish the work of the craftsman from the perfection of Allah. More subtly, hand-printed wallpaper contains many small variations in the alignment of the pattern. Although mainstream wallpaper-printing technology produces perfectly aligned wallpaper patterns, some wallpaper buyers prize the variations.

If we set aside such efforts at the conspicuously hand-made, it seems as though we are rapidly approaching a stage in which almost everything can be digitally described and digitally reproduced, in a way that would make one wonder about the significance of an original. In particular, any art that is digital in its origins seems inherently copiable, with arbitrarily high fidelity, unless we take specific steps to stop that from happening. In such a case – which did not exist when Benjamin wrote about these issues – it seems nonsensical to claim that an art work loses its “aura” when reproduced. Confronted with two identical collections of bits, it’s literally meaningless to ask which is the original and which is the copy, and anyone claiming to detect an “aura” associated with one of them is simply delusional. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that what Benjamin considered “aura” was simply some impossible-to-copy aspects of the original; these aspects could still be detected (perhaps subconsciously) in the original, but were not transferred to any copy and accordingly could not be detected there.

Uncopiable art

The non-digital world still contains many examples of artworks that are hard to copy to a comparable level of fidelity. Consider a three-dimensional object like a Rodin sculpture. If one is not in the physical presence of the actual sculpture, is one really having the “full” experience of the artwork? There are a variety of ways of getting what we might call “60-80% experience,” but there’s no other way of getting the identical experience. Being adjacent to the sculpture in space is very different from seeing it on a screen. Virtual reality (VR) technologies are not yet sufficiently good, either. Even 3-D printing, for all its sophistication, only gets us to the place we were in former times with plaster casts. It’s not a bad thing to have a collection of plaster casts or 3-D printed models, but the artistic consensus seems to be that plaster casts are only a weak substitute for engaging with “the real thing.”

Another example of hard-to-reproduce art is the work of Agnes Martin, which involves subtle lines and shades that are sometimes challenging to perceive even when one is looking very closely at the original. As a result, it’s quite an odd experience to see a book in which there are small reproductions of large Agnes Martin works: if one knows the work, one also knows that the reproduction isn’t very good.

Heavily copied art

What about the opposite extreme, where we consider an artwork that has been widely reproduced? If we consider a work like the Mona Lisa, Benjamin is both obviously right and obviously wrong. Benjamin is obviously right because the image is reproduced, appropriated, and adapted so often that the actual artifact is almost irrelevant in some ways. Would the loss of the original really affect the presence of the image in the world? No. Indeed, losing the original might instead increase the presence of the image in the world, by adding new copies related to the news, and by creating new advertising or satire related to the loss. But at the same time, Benjamin is obviously wrong: there are still literally millions of people who visit the Louvre each year, and some substantial fraction of those people take the time to visit the Mona Lisa. Indeed, the ubiquitous reproduction of the Mona Lisa serves to enhance the cultic significance of the original.

Is there an experience of being with an object that is different from seeing the object on a screen? We certainly know from our own experiences in our homes that we experience objects differently from images of objects. The artifacts we can walk around and touch are different in kind from things that we can see on a screen. However, those same artifacts, when transplanted to a museum, become too precious for the museum to let us walk around them or touch them. Instead, one of the inevitable consequences of including a precious object in a museum is that it becomes a kind of shadow of its former self. It is carefully catalogued and photographed, and the original object is carefully preserved. But the viewer’s experience of it may be greatly impaired, unless the viewer happens to be a part of the small select audience of scholars and curators that are allowed to interact directly with the object.

Conclusion

What have we learned about the relationship between art and science? We could say that the role of unique artifacts and the lack of citations is historically important in art. However, that uniqueness of artifacts appears increasingly hard to sustain in a digital world. Perhaps we will increasingly see art and science as similarly driven, similarly experiment-based fields.

Even if we do indeed see decreasing importance of unique artifacts,  there is still a difference in cultural values. Scientists place a high cultural importance on acknowledging influence and predecessors, while for artists this issue seems to be somewhere between “unimportant” and “activey avoided.” A more scientific approach to art might identify influences for those who care. Would this be an improvement? That seems unlikely.

Then again, we could flip the comparison and consider more artistic approaches to science. We can observe that there is really no figure in the scientific community that corresponds to the art critic, and perhaps that is another crucial part of this story. Is the art critic supplying the connections for art that scientists supply themselves for science? Or is it rather that we could usefully have a science critic to tell us useful things about a scientific endeavor and its relationship to others?

It seems likely that in both science and in art, there is an important distinction between work that is interesting in its own right vs. work that shows others a new direction. In both fields, the highest honors go to work that accomplishes both of these goals at the same time.