ORIGINS: The Vision
The test of life in a work of art is its power to rouse our senses to a state of responsive happiness which communicates itself to our whole being: this power is the distinctive quality of the work of art.
Dr. Lorenz Eitner (1919-2009), Stanford University
ORIGINS
Preface: Art is a Sensual Experience
Among all the creatures of the earth man alone has the capacity to engage in abstract thought. Only man can mentally conjure up concepts that have no corollary in the physical world. This gift allows him to explore intangible thoughts and beliefs, such as freedom, justice, and love—to name only a few. It also provides access to experiences that have never been experienced, to speculate on the future, and to ponder his own existence. Nothing, it seems, is beyond man’s speculations and imaginings.
But as inspiring as all of this may be, the real miracle is left to those few souls—we call them artists—who willingly face the nearly insurmountable task of giving real shape and substance to the intangible, to transform abstract thought into sensory experience.
This talent is far more fantastic than the relatively simple labor of thinking abstract thoughts. Without physical form the imaginings of a human being—no matter how innovative or satisfying—amount to literally nothing. Unless an artist paints, sculpts or draws an idea, its value is lost, because to communicate it the conceptual must enter the realm of the perceptual.
Ask any artist, writer, poet or filmmaker about the process of creation, and they will speak of the excruciating frustration of transforming an abstract vision into material form—the result is always less than satisfying. As Michelangelo wrote: “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”
If the formal composition of a work lacks the adequate expressive capacity to relate the idea, the idea is of no consequence. An inferior, poorly conceived material envelope eviscerates any idea—no matter how great. Vincent Van Gogh once summarized the near impossibility of the task by stating simply: “It is so difficult to make a thought a thing, to put it into lines and colors.”
But can the “lines and colors” of a formal composition exist independent of a particularly compelling idea? The answer is a resounding yes. The formal composition of a work of art can carry meaning, and this was explored in great detail by an entire mid-20th century movement in art—Abstract Expressionism.
As we shall demonstrate later, the independence of form from content is centered on the actual workings of the brain itself. When the human brain confronts a work of art, it prioritizes the various stages of the process it must engage to experience it. The brain ranks pure sensory experience as the first order of business—to the exclusion of all else. It assimilates the various elements of a work’s formal composition and, then, if the form of the object is deemed satisfying, activates the pleasure centers of the brain. All of this is done well before the brain employs its cognitive functions to decipher subject matter and identify the ideas and beliefs that the image might carry.
This experience of art, expressed solely through the formal composition of the work itself, is a primal and biological part of man. It is an innate part of every human being’s constitution. Put simply, the appreciation of art’s sensual nature is entirely and utterly natural. Such things as ideas and beliefs attach themselves to art and are secondary to this simple fact: from the very birth of humanity, man was born with a sophisticated, fully developed understanding of and an appreciation for the formal qualities of art. The same cannot be said of the ideas that attach to art.
Art is, at its very core, a sensual experience.
Everything that is compelling and profoundly meaningful about art is concentrated in the viewer’s experience of the physical composition of the object itself. When the beholder confronts a work directly, the human mind, in “a turbulent confluence of sense impressions and involuntary associations,” receives the authentic and complete message of a work of art.
Quality in art is based in a work of art’s formal arrangement, and the capacity of this arrangement to arouse a highly resonant, emotional response in the viewer. This is why we identify objects that possess a virtuosic organization of formal elements as “masterpieces.” These extraordinary works compose the canon of art history, and they alone possess the expressive power to fulfill a work of art’s true intention: “to rouse our senses to a state of responsive happiness which communicates itself to our whole being.”
The Crisis of Meaning
The Crisis of Meaning
Today’s art institutions are locked in a profound crisis of meaning, born from a fundamental misunderstanding of art’s very nature.
To press art into the service of political ideology, the contemporary establishment defines art as an intellectual—not a sensual—exercise.
Modern criticism has dismissed for decades the formalist approach advocated by ORIGINS. The argument is that such concepts as “quality in art” or “beauty” are antiquated notions—“Romantic myths” better suited to the 19th century than the 21st. This view maintains that to concentrate on the attractive, physical nature of a work, no matter how engaging its formal composition might be, is to be deceived by its purely superficial charm.
But the transcendental power of the art experience—the sense of completion and universal connection it brings—is simply too profound to ignore. It is primary to art, and it supersedes any secondary narrative that pretends to attach to it—including political and social transformation. This truth is anathema to the modern institutional view of culture. The power to incite social change comes not from the contentment that culture brings, but from the anxiety and urgency of the next political cause.
The public has been relentlessly assaulted with the false assertion that the beholder’s experience of aesthetic beauty is merely an “illusion”—akin to religion. That it weakens the human constitution with empty promises of pleasure and joy. Stripping art of its emotional power, the establishment achieves its real objective: distracting the individual away from the inward journey for transformative experience and toward the “greater good”—the collective’s initiative for radical social change. In the hands of our institutions directing culture, art is debased to simply advocating ideas, relegating the masterpiece to mere illustration, a placard full of sloganeering—a poster for the cause.
The view of ORIGINS diverges significantly from the dominant view of art taught in our universities and promulgated in our museums. This “academic” or “establishment” viewpoint—has dominated art criticism and art history since the 1960s. It maintains that the meaning of art is found in ideas and concepts: its purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to expose the corruption and injustices that lie at the heart of a capitalist society that exploits the many by the few. engaging with Marxism Radical Feminism and concerning with such current ideological topics as racial and environmental injustice, prejudices.According to this viewpoint, the highest function of art is ideological, it requires beliefs, values, and political or social ideas to exist and maintain its relevance.
The Biology of a Masterpiece
Your brain makes an aesthetic judgment in one-third the time it takes to blink your eyes….[and] communicates this verdict—“extraordinary” or “ordinary”—directly to its pleasure and reward centers. Because this happens at 50 milliseconds, and the cognitive process required for identifying subject matter doesn’t begin until 150 milliseconds, your nervous system triggers an emotional response before the intellect has even had time to identify what it is looking at. The human brain is quite literally “hardwired” for aesthetic experience.
The Biology of a Masterpiece
If we are predisposed to judge aesthetic quality as ORIGINS suggests, can this be grounded in empirical evidence and validated by scientific inquiry?
One of the most profound advances to occur in the visual arts in the last 25 years is the rise of the pioneering field of neuroaesthetics. Using brain imaging and eye-tracking technologies, this field is able to measure the speed and intensity of the human nervous system’s response to visual stimuli.
Breakthrough studies have proven that the human brain makes a judgment about the formal qualities of a work of art—whether they are "extraordinary or ordinary," "profound or generic"—within 50 milliseconds of viewing a work.
Let’s put that into perspective, A single eye blink takes 100 to 150 milliseconds. Your brain makes an aesthetic judgment in one-third the time it takes to blink your eyes.
Significantly, the brain makes its first priority the evaluation of a work of art’s formal properties. Your brain communicates its verdict—“extraordinary” or “ordinary”—directly to its pleasure and reward centers. Because this happens at 50 milliseconds, and the cognitive process required for identifying subject matter doesn’t begin until 150 milliseconds, your nervous system triggers an emotional response three times faster than it can cognitively disentangle subject matter and identify what it is looking at.
Truly masterful compositions—where the formal composition of a work achieves a precise visual tension—evoke massive, immediate spikes in neural activity. Conversely, a poorly composed work triggers a weak, scattered response. Rather than dwelling on the mundane, the brain privileges compositions it judges to be compelling, moving them into deeper neural networks of memory and reflection that we naturally tend to revisit. Even more remarkable is that this all happens pre-consciously, before you even take a conscious breath.
The human brain acts naturally and innately to assimilate, judge and react to aesthetic experience.
This proves what many in the art establishment have resisted to accept: the capacity of human beings to be profoundly moved by physical beauty is a biological, universal constant. Our response to art is involuntary and emotional. It is not driven intellectually; it is not inspired by text. We are activating an ancient, evolutionary mechanism. The brain’s response to visual harmony is ingrained in our biology just as much as our response to a clean water source or a safe shelter.
At ORIGINS, this data dictates how we write about art, advocate for art, present art and how we will build our sanctuary. It directs our exhibition policy, clearing away textual distractions so the object can directly engage the viewer. Equally, it directs our architectural design, using these neurological insights to create a space—through light, scale, and natural materials—specifically engineered to prepare the viewer to confront masterpieces of the world’s cultures.
We no longer speculate at what makes an art sanctuary. We are building one on a foundation of empirical evidence.
The Direct Confrontation
The Direct Confrontation
When we enter the physical presence of a masterpiece, our reaction is not an intellectual choice, but an involuntary, deeply embedded evolutionary reflex. Modern science has demonstrated that the human brain makes a pre-conscious judgment about the formal composition of a work of art, triggering an emotional response up to three times faster than the intellect can begin to disentangle subject matter. When confronting a work of art directly, the human brain is hardwired to prioritize the emotional pleasure of pure aesthetic experience over the cognitive demands of subject matter.
All of the ideas that modern researchers find so compelling may be perfectly valid topics for study, but they are all secondary to the direct confrontation with the art object itself.
Whether the work was executed yesterday or three thousand years ago makes no difference.
Whether it emerged from Western traditions or a culture entirely foreign to our own does not matter.
Whether we have read volumes of history and academic theory or absolutely nothing at all changes nothing.
The human brain is indifferent.
The ability to experience art fully through the lens of formalism is universal to all of mankind, When we stand before a work that we judge to be extraordinary and are moved by it, we are engaging in a natural, perfectly human response that is entirely out of our control.
The genesis of art is not located in an intellectual process. The ability to partake of the unmitigated pleasure of art’s physical beauty is involuntary, it is emotional, it is instinctual, and it is part of human biology.
It is in our ORIGINS.
