Art (That) Works PDF
Preview Art (That) Works
A R T A (THAT) R W O R K S T ( T H SYSTEMS OF FIT A Beauty Is Fit Sarah Perry T Chords and Maps Gabe Duquette Mills Baker ) Generic Fit Suspended Reason Gabe Duquette W ART AS ENGINEERING Peli Grietzer Art as Engineering Gabe Duquette, The Sublemon O Gwern Objectivity and Art Mills Baker John Nerst R Compressiveness Peli Grietzer Sarah Perry K WHERE ARE WE NOW Suspended Reason S Belonging > Innovation Gabe Duquette Sam Rosen A Letter About Art Peli Grietzer But What Are Birds Really? Sam Rosen Voices on the Genius of the Bit Artists John Nerst Culture Is Not About Esthetics Gwern PB AA RR TT ((TTHHAATT)) WW OO RR KK SS FALL 2020 NOTNOTHING.OOO WHAT IS FIT? Beauty Is Fit 13 Sarah Perry Chords & Maps 20 Gabe Duquette Generic Fit 23 Suspended Reason ART AS ENGINEERING Art as Engineering 41 G. Duquette, The Sublemon Objectivity & Art 57 Mills Baker Compressiveness 73 Peli Grietzer WHERE ARE WE NOW? Belonging > Innovation 83 G.Duquette A Letter About Art 87 P.Grietzer But What Are Birds Really? 92 Sam Rosen Voices on the Genius of the 99 Bit Artists John Nerst t Culture Is Not About Esthetics 112 Gwern Preface This the first entry in what will hopefully become a series, each entry attempting to capture and pre- serve a subcultural conversation happening outside of traditional knowledge-work institutions, and to export that conversation beyond its original bounds. The aesthetics blogosphere is a loose network of bloggers on the perimeter of the rationalist and postrationalist scenes. They include The Sublemon, Gabe Duquette of Liposuction, Sam Rosen of Saner than Lasagna, and Peli Grietzer of Second Balcony. Other writers, whose body of work is not primar- ily about aesthetics but whose ventures have been discursively influential, include Sarah Perry, in her writings on mess, order, and wholeness; Owain Evans, in his work on compression; independent reserachers Kevin Simler and Gwern; and John Nerst of Everything Studies.[1] Many of these writers are united by an interest in the successes of traditional, evolved “anti-design” 5 approaches, where the discovery of working solutions builds and compounds on itself over generations; this in opposition to the modernist mode of revolution and reinvention—cults of failed planners and top-down interventionism buoyed by hubris or idealism, foist- ing non-working principles on their publics.[2] They argue that, whereas traditional design is voluntarily se- lected and transmitted over generations for its “fitness” with human life and flourishing, the modern emphasis on style, innovation for its own sake, and the persona of the genius inventor have led to misfit and ugliness in the modern built environment, from our cities to our visual arts. This skepticism of experimentalism as prac- ticed—of its level of rigor, its success at generating and accumulating insight, its constant flights to cosmeti- cism or an aesthetics of “experimentation”—carries over into Rosen’s critiques of modernist painting, Duquette’s “Belonging > Innovation,” or Sublemon’s “How We Frame the Value of ‘Experimental’ Art Badly.” (Grietzer is more bullish on avant-garde work; see “A Letter About Art,” as well as his dissertation work on vibe in modernist literature.) Beauty is considered, explicitly and implicitly (as in the case of neuroaesthetics), as more objective, or at least less “subjective,”[3] than is typically assumed in main- stream or academic art discourse, in the sense of there being a regular, innate relationship between formal qualities and viewer experience. As Simler points out in his writing on the attraction of pollinators to plants, or the intricate nests of the bowerbird, there is good evidence that an aesthetic sense is both biological and non-unique to human beings. The psychological, ex- periential dimension of aesthetic encounters is always at the forefront, allowing the spiritual humanism of Christopher Alexander and the information-theoretic ideas of Jürgen Schmidhuber to coexist—both being merely perspectives, or levels of zoom, from which to view the same phenomena. On the question of wheth- er it is possible, or productive, to define art,[4] the essays are divided, some attempting to advance better or broader factorings, other renouncing the project en- tirely (see Rosen’s “But what are birds, really?”). Alexander and Schmidhuber are perhaps the two pri- marily intellectual sources of lineage here. Alexander, an outsider architect, believed that humans, like many other species, evolved patterns of architectural orga- nization over millennia which were uniquely suited to human flourishing, and that these patterns have been largely left behind in the West in favor of mod- ern prestige aesthetics. Strong design, to Alexander, comes down most centrally to a fitness between parts, an interrelation and harmony between components at many levels of scale, as Perry unpacks in the essay that opens this collection, “What Is Fit?” Schmidhuber, meanwhile, is a cognitive scientist best known for his essay “Driven By Compression Progress,” which theorizes that aesthetic beauty (along with jokes, cre- ativity, science, surprise, attention) is a property of 7
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