What is the science behind art?

what is the science behind philosophy?

SHIA LABEAOUIYF

[math]\phi[/math]

Positive thinking?

I didn't say or imply that good mathematicians make great composers, just saying that music theory follows strict mathematical rules. Same can be said for visual arts with symmetry and geometry.

HAKUNA MATATA

Ah I see

Artist here who spent a good deal of time analyzing great paintings while in school. Was able to see, hold and inspect with my gloved hands original works of art from the modern greats like John Singer Sargent, Degas, and also some Baroque period Italian work. Was able to do this because I went to an expensive school which had an expensive collection of art work in an extremely well kept expensive facility.

Anyway, paintings ("art") used to be made beginning with a composition that was more or less inspired by natural phenomena- artists spent a great deal of time drawing the natural world from direct observation, and then modifying these observations to make them either easier to render and align "nicely" within the proportions of the canvas they were using. Nicely usually ends up meaning usually ends up meaning "looks like it won't fall over," i.e. you will tend to see darker "heavier" looking shapes near the bottom of the canvas and so on. Important to note that while the "looks like it won't fall over" compositions are eyeballed, the good ones are remarkably consistent, and IMHO artists are not given enough credit for what they can do without any formal measurement.

So any symmetry that might be seen is going to be a result of whatever symmetry is observed in nature, however idealized and exaggerated it is. I really want to emphasize that the "looks like it won't fall over" is a no-joke visual test we artists do and have done for a long time. It's easy to distinguish between the ones who "get it" and the ones who don't by simply scrutinizing the painting with that simple question. I'll let you in on a dirty secret too: once you learn to "see" the weight in paintings, you can easily discern which paintings were made by our Jewish friends and which were not. Jews have notoriously bad visual-spatial perception and very few are capable of making realistic paintings which convincingly depict objects in three dimensional space.

One way I like to think about it is in the sort of trite, sort of bullshit-sounding phrase:
> "Art is a conversation."

Now that phrase is definitely useful for looking at art as an artist, and contributing to the world by making work, but how does it help us look at what art is? Well often we consider art to be about the aesthetic, but often it fringes into the political too.
> that is, it makes some commentary on the world around it in some sense, whether it's Trump, or social inequality or how we treat [x] people in society. (Nb: Artists tend to lean left)
Note that this sort of thinking about art (as a conversation that includes the political) is what ends up with those weird things that "artists" are doing that they're *calling* art, but most ordinary folks (joe bloggs types) would call bullshit.
But let's ignore that political for a moment, and consider art to be a conversation about the aesthetic world. Imagine that you're someone who's trained as an artist in any era, and you've learned all about the art that's around you and came before you. But maybe you want to create something new. Something that makes you stand out from all the masters around you. So you come up with some style that's never been seen before. Or maybe you've come up with some new style you love without any of that ego crap (unlikely).
And so you work on this new thing you're doing, and you present it to the world and maybe people love it and maybe people hate it, and maybe people just don't notice it/ignore it. (I hope I don't need to point out which of those is the worst case scenario for an artist.)

I have more to say, but post is too long. Hold on.

So anyway, the point of thinking about art as a conversation is that if you aren't participating in the same conversation everyone else is having—if you're so far out of left field that noone understands
you—you won't be noticed. People won't understand what you're doing as art even.

And as importantly, when you're participating in a conversation, you don't want to just walk in and start talking to a bunch of people about crap that you think is cool and interesting. Why? Well if someone's already said what you walked up and said, you'll look like a dick; or if you show no understanding of what people have been saying, it'll show, and noone will respect you as knowing what you're talking about. This is why they teach art history to art students.

Now once you're really using it, this model can also explain those pieces that your sister thinks her kid could make. Pollock? Mondrian? Josef Albers! Even those sketches that Picasso did of bulls.
> "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."
> (We might consider that Picasso, the massive ego that he was, held conversation mostly with himself.)
Yes! Those works *could* have been done by your child. But when someone says "but you [they] didn't" that means something. You didn't create this thing because you didn't know what we were talking about. You didn't create it because if someone invited you to the table, you wouldn't know what to say because you haven't been listening. You'd likely say something you think is clever, and if they others are polite they'll say,
> Oh yes, X said that in the 80s, you're quite right.
And you know why you're saying that? Because the ideas that X was putting forward have finally reached your dense skull. Remember that scene in Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep schools Hathaway like the dipshit she is? Here:
youtu.be/p5WWy_0VLS4
Well that scene is real. That's what happens.

Now personally I think there's a bit more to art than fashion, but maybe that's just my elitism.

In any case, I don't want to waffle, but this Conversation model helps us here to consider art as not just an aesthetic phenomenon, but a social one. Who controls the conversation? Currently a lot of people would say it's the gallery owners and curators. Not by speaking themselves, but by picking what they like to hear (see) and giving the podium to the artists who're making those works.

Notably, art cannot help but be influenced by what else is happening in the rest of the world. Are artists making works inspired by Syria? Absolutely. Are artists making works that they think will sell well. No doubt. Are people buying works that seem to make a statement about themselves?
> "I have good taste"
> "I can afford expensive things"
Yes.

So sure, this conversation is happening within the art world, but it's listening to everybody else too.

So how do we view Art through science? I think you can't really approach art at all from the perspective of a hard science. It's a social phenomenon. It's guided by basic psycho-physical principles
> we like various types of symmetries
> we like certain colors to be balanced
> we like certain subject matter (the human mind dedicates a massive amount of processing power to looking at faces)
> we like things that are "new" in some sense
but it will always be guided by the rest of the social world, and everything that's come before it in the art world. So it's a lot like sociology; it's a complete fucking mess, it changes the moment you understand it, and there's no way of knowing for sure that what you suspect is really the case.

Dufay wrote his songs using geometric patterns
For example this song youtu.be/_dV5b8AuLHg he wrote to dedicate the Cathedral of Florence in the 1400s. The song was written according to the geometry of the dome and arches. Ratios and Pythagorean theorem are all at work in this song.

If you need to use science, you just don't have it.

Please devote your time in something more practical, like exterminating a race you don't like.

I imagine it has something to do with our instinctual affinity for patterns

I think you mean what is the philosophy behind science.

For the Veeky Forums version so you can see the patterns youtube.com/watch?v=hGW2HL35kqY

Even the floors of the Cathedral of Florence contain mathematical patterns

remember when science used to be called "Natural philosophy"

It was actually 'natural science' as distinguished from 'moral science' (yes, philosophy is science)

Philosophy is math too, eventually you end up in modal/substructural logic/axioms

Just throwing ins a picture of a fractal because they look relevant.

Neurons latching on to patterns and connecting dimensional dots together.

Art is caricature. Visual art takes aspects of the subject matter and amplifies them to produce a more striking effect. Our internal model of, for example, a familiar face is a set of eigenvalues that distinguish it from one of those bland "average" faces made up of multiple blended images. Music takes natural sounds and emphasises aspects by rhythm and repetition. Written stories tend to have larger-than-life characters or themes; if they don't, they are boring. And so it goes.