Saturday, May 16, 2009

Ramachandran's Explantion of Art



This a very intresting Youtube video and lecture posted by University of California that introduced me to plenty of amusing facts in effort to answer the ultimate question- What is the meaning of art?

V.S. Ramachandran can be easily proclaimed one of the people who take a scientific view toward this question. He, himself, states that he is not a "philosopher." Taking the empirical view toward art led him to dismantle art into 8 features that make it great and successful in fulling its intent. As an Indian, he concentrates most on Indian works. I did not mind this, but I think it would have been more powerful if he took examples from a larger spectrum of art. Stating that Indian sculptures are more erotic than Playboy pin-ups was an unusually comparison. I did not find this to be the case with me. Playboy pictures in most cases were more erotic than Indian sculptures.

V.S. Ramachandran tries to underline the features of art that make it universally amazing to all viewers. Nonetheless, the flaw in this is that some art is not universally pleasant to all. Thus, he critiques people, who don't like Picasso's paintings or Beethoven's classical music. He states that this is because people through there superego suppressed their true feelings. Because they knew that a person's eyes are not supposed to look like that, they suppress their feelings of amazement when they look at Picasso's paintings. He even puts down people who dislike Beethoven's music, as simply their incapability to comprehend true art. Personally, classical music is not my favorite genre. It doesn't evoke emotion to me as other music does. Maybe, it is because as Ramachandran stated of my superego; however, a more realistic explanation would be that different people like different things. Maybe there are vast overlapping features of art that underline the universal artistic principles that make it attractive, but people who don't like some musical or artistic masterpiece is not because of their self-suppression of emotions, but because they were simply born with different tastes.
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