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Written by Oscar Holland, CNN

When Pete Eckert started going blind, he decided to channel his feelings of loss into art. In his 20s at the time, Eckert would spend whole days preparing graphite drawings and woodcuts before asking his wife to describe the results to him.

But the process was, in his own words, "driving my wife crazy." So in search of a more instantaneous medium, he turned his hand to photography.

"When I started out, digital cameras hadn't wiped out mom-and-pop photography shops yet," Eckert said on the phone from his home in Sacramento, California. "I would go in and buy two rolls of film and ask ten questions. I went every day. And by asking questions and getting feedback, I learned."

More than two decades after entirely losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, Eckert has established a successful career as a self-taught photographer. His striking, ghostly images have been sought after by the likes of Playboy magazine, which commissioned a series of eerie nudes, and Volkswagen, which recently hired Eckert to photograph its new car for an advertising campaign.

"I view my work, and the blind photography movement, as an extension of the impressionist movement from a hundred years ago," he said. "A lot of the impressionists had vision problems, they showed a different way to interpret things. The blind photography movement is the next logical step."

Playing with light

During his first forays into photography, Eckert would go on excursions at night with his German Shepherd, Uzu, for protection. He began by photographing statues, though he soon sought more interesting subject matter.

"To take photos of sculptures isn't really fair because the art is already there," he said. "What I was looking for was a way of graphically showing what blindness is like."

This new focus resulted in a distinct photographic aesthetic -- images composed of ghostly figures and artfully blurred lines. Playing with light and long exposures, Eckert builds the pictures in his mind, using sound and touch to visualize his subjects.

"I actually build the images with layers and layers of information -- I'm memorizing the layers as I put them together," said Eckert, who claims to be able to store up to 100 images in his short-term memory.

"Like a bat, I can use my voice to echolocate my model. In (my pitch-black studio), I layer light, measuring what I've done until I'm satisfied with the image in my mind's eye. People ask me how I know how to stop. But since I'm building the image, I have a very clear image of what's happened. At that point, why would I need sighted people at all?"

Many of Eckert's pictures are shot in his home studio, though some of his most arresting images merge phantom-like figures with outdoor backdrops. He has even taken to photojournalism though his collection "Bus Series," in which he documents the difficulties facing blind and disabled people on public transport.

"You come to understand the 'sound signature' of an object," he said. "Take a stop sign, for instance. A stop sign shimmering in the wind vibrates and (projects) this image that oscillates. At first you can't hear the pole holding up the sign ... but it has a sound shadow that's many feet long.

"I actively listen to things, and then go up to touch them so I can relate the sound shadow to what that object actually is," he said. "I'm slowly building a language of sound to associate with the objects.

"It's like a baby learning to see. When they're first born, babies can't see well at all. As they learn to see, they have to associate words to objects and they become more real."

The world as he sees it

Eckert's images aren't simply metaphors for blindness. Many of them have been shot to literally represent what his mind sees, offering sighted people a compelling look into his world.

Eckert claims to be able to see "light" emanating from his own bones, something he compares to the "phantom limb" sensation experienced by some amputees. He believes that this phenomenon is a result of his ongoing efforts to perceive the world around him.

"There is a section of the brain that's not being used when you're blind," he said. "(But) your brain, is ready to (redirect) that capacity. So, for the past 20 years, I've been actively rewiring my visual cortex through sound, touch and memory inputs.

"I believe that if someone did an MRI on me, my visual cortex would be just as active -- and it would be cross-wired with my other senses."
See more of Pete Eckert's photos at www.peteeckert.com

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life through the lens of a blind photographer - cnn

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Life through the lens of a blind photographer

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Written by Oscar Holland, CNN When Pete Eckert started going blind, he decided to channel his feelings of loss into art. In his 20s at the time, Eckert would spend whole days preparing graphite drawings and woodcuts before asking his wife to describe the results to him.

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Rose in Winter

...... -for my mother, Mary Mraz Culleny,
......... b. December 8, 1917
.

a cathedral steeple's being launched,
snow swirls around its nave

so much stone to be sent aloft
on the tiny spark of a solitary rose

so much weight to be thrust into something other
by the flame of a delicate rose

from cold to colder it ascends
by the blaze of a redhot dot of life
on a stem

from breath to unbreath it'll rise
by the spit fire of a steadfast
solitary rose
.
Jim Culleny
12/09/18
Photograph by Abbas Raza
Jennifer Packer. Carolina, 2011.

Oil on linen.

Current show in NYC.

Sometime in 1993 Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, known as IZ to his many fans, calls his producer at 2AM and sets up a recording session ASAP. He records a handful of tunes, just his voice and ukulele, one tune after the other, all single takes, and goes home. One of those takes was a medley that inserted "What a Wonderful World" into "Over the Rainbow." The medley was issued on Kamakawiwo'ole's 1993 CD, Facing Future. In 1998 the medley was on the soundtrack of Meet Joe Black. In 2005 Facing Future went platinum (1 million or more units sold), the first Hawaiian album to do so. (Record label site for Kamakawiwo'ole.)

In this post I want to take a look at that medley and its subsequent history. The two songs in the medley are standards - a term of art in discussing pop music of the Big Band era and more recent music of that kind. Judy Garland recorded "Rainbow" for The Wizard of Oz at the height of the big band era, 1938. It became an instant hit and has been recorded hundreds of times. Armstrong recorded "Wonderful" in 1967, when big bands had been thoroughly eclipsed by rock and roll. It became a hit in the UK, but not in the USA. Armstrong's recording got a second chance when it was used on the soundtrack of Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987. Though not the first, Kamakawiwo'ole's cover of the song was one of the earliest.
by Dave Maier
It's been a while since I posted on this issue, and I've already said most of what I intended to say about it, but things seem to be coming to a head in my own state, and I thought I'd report on that, including a couple of weird local wrinkles (the Garden State is a strange place). Three weeks ago, after months of missed deadlines, an adult-use marijuana legalization bill was approved by a joint (Assembly/Senate, that is, not ... never mind) committee of the legislature, and may (note: may) be voted on later this year. If it is passed and signed into law by the governor - neither of which is a given - New Jersey would be the eleventh state to legalize adult use, and the second to do so by legislative action. (Washington and Colorado in 2012, Alaska and Oregon in 2014, California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nevada in 2016, and Michigan in 2018 did so by voter referendum; Vermont did so by legislative action (in 2017, I think), although that state's bill did not set up a legal market, which means that while it is legal to grow marijuana in one's basement there, it remains illegal to buy seeds to do so.)

In this Friday's local newspaper, one Republican senator, an opponent of the bill, was granted the entire space of the letters page for a long guest opinion on the matter. I'll try not to debunk his points one by one, which would be boring (not to mention inconclusive, as we'll see), but I did have a few thoughts. Read more "

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for my mother, Mary Mraz Culleny, ......... b. December 8, 1917 . a cathedral steeple's being launched, snow swirls around its nave so much stone to be sent aloft on the tiny spark of a solitary rose so much weight to be thrust into something other by the flame of a delicate rose from cold to colder it ascends by the blaze of a redhot dot of life on a stem from breath to unbreath it'll rise by the spit fire of a steadfast solitary rose .

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Sometime in the late Fifties, Roman Vishniac, a pioneer of photomicrography, picked up a knife, cut a thick horizontal slice of skin from his own thumb and photographed it under a microscope using polarized light. The resulting image succeeded on two levels: the scientific parsing of human skin's rich textural terrain; and the chromatic revelation of natural beauty at a visual scale heretofore inaccessible. By subjecting himself to that brief ouch, he was able to expose the intricacies of the body's largest organ and dramatize a new frontier of optical exploration that would grow exponentially as the technology became more sophisticated. Since then, the dual roles of photomicrography-contributing to scientific investigation, and unveiling eye-popping, artistic devils in the details-has expanded, yielding hidden treasures of a microcosmic universe so populous and dense that the planetary universe of outer space seems paltry by comparison. In some ways this universe of the tiny is more forthcoming than outer space with its endless stretches of nothingness between the orbs.

It is almost impossible to contemplate infinity without feeling infinitesimal. The paradoxical effect of trying to wrap our brains around something as vast as the universe is the realization that we will always be tinier than the tiniest subatomic particle. Compare it to a single cell inside our own bodies trying to fathom the infinity of its host. Infinity makes us giddy.

The reach for infinity usually moves toward outer space and all those unimaginable yonders out there. But what of the other direction, the 'infinitesimals' around and under us, so much smaller than our own miniscule selves? What to make of the recently estimated 23 billion tons of microscopic life at ground level and below our feet, packed together like canned sardines in neighborly proximity to us? This macrograph of a mite on a honey bee isn't a spectacular image, but it does suggest reverse infinity: Is there a mite on the mite? If so, is there a mite on that mite? And so on.

It's not necessary to go deep in this direction to make head-turning discoveries. Technological advances in photomicrography allow us to see far into the invisible world of living organisms and matter, to enter a riotous realm teeming with diversity. As Henry David Thoreau said, ' Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.' At this end of the infinity spectrum the sheer density of geological and biological matter within a relatively small space contains multiple worlds for exploration, edification, and aesthetic experience, at all levels of magnification.

If drone photography is about optimal framing of a terrain from above, the showy side of photomicrography could be described as a dazzling fashion shoot. The frame becomes secondary to the object of desire. If the drone photographer is a curator, then the photomicrographer is a stylist, dressing his client in the best possible light for his close-up. The use of color fluorescence, or fluorophores which artificially embellish the wee celebrities, are, at the scientific level, tools of differentiation, a form of color-coding, allowing scientists to separate properties, functions and substances within a given image. The aesthetic bi-products of these interventions span a cultural swath all the way from Las Vegas and pop culture to MOMA-worthy abstract art, including detours to Hollywood's CGI animation studios (with monsters no human imagination could possibly conceive). Nikon recognized the potential appeal of this field early on with an annual competition that goes back more than 40 years, Nikon's Small World.

Of all the optical technologies for microscopic study, none is more spectacular than the confocal laser scanning microscope, the instrument of choice for many of the participants in Nikon's competition. Invented by Marvin Minsky (before he moved on to other pinnacles), confocal technology provides details impossible to achieve with lens-based technology. To understand its capabilities, consider the male diving beetle ( acilius sulcatus), specifically the underside of his front tarsus, exposed most spectacularly in the work of Igor Siwanowicz, a Polish-born neurobiologist whose extracurricular interest in mantises led him first to photomacrography (extreme close-ups of tiny, but visible subjects), and then eventually down into the hidden, subvisible depths of confocal photomicrography where he has accessed the entire color spectrum to achieve startling, exacting images of his subjects.

That male beetle is less than an inch long, which relegates his front feet to the domain of photomicrography at whatever level or technique of magnification. The graphic splendor of Siwanowicz's image, the exotic night-blooming flower we take it to be before reading the fine print, is nearly upstaged when we learn that the suction cups (only one of the intricate functional mechanisms displayed in the image) serve one purpose only, to keep the male from sliding off the back of the female when mating.

Another of Siwanowicz's celebrities, the humped bladderwort ( utricularia gibba) is a carnivorous plant he retrieved from a pond in Virginia not far from where I grew up. Measuring in at a whopping 1-2 millimeters, the plant's trap metamorphizes into a photogenic killing machine of extravagant complexity under the photomicrographer's scrutiny. The desmids it preys upon, seen languishing in its maw, are even tinier-animal-like organisms whose multiple shapes are formal enough to show up on any European coat-of-arms.

With all that color dominating the field, sometimes less becomes more, and more of a surprise, as demonstrated by this enchanting, monochromatic capture of the tracheoles (respiratory tubes) of a European honey bee, by Dr. Lorenzo Domenis. The twisting trunks of trees in a classic Japanese woodblock print could not look more artistic than this:

Art of another, more abstract kind can be seen in the photomicrographs of inanimate materials such as chemical compounds, minerals, acids and biochemical substances. The advantage of working with these materials is that they often come with their own luminescence and colors that emerge under certain lighting conditions. This is where abstract beauties strut their stuff-with colors and color combinations, with luminosity, with dynamic structural complexities and confounding geometrical constructions, and with textures and surfaces both strange and familiar. Who would have thought that a crystal of battery leakage could look like an embroidered tapestry? A kinship with drone photography can be found in the need for optimal framing in these works. Lighting conditions can alter multiple aspects of the substances so that the photomicrographer must also cull or curate the images out of a diverse array of visual effects.

Some exciting works in this category were accomplished far from the high-tech labs of scientific research. Justin Zoll crystallizes amino acids, vitamins, aspirin, and other mundane substances at home and produces his images by attaching the camera to a simple high school microscope he bought on eBay and turning on the lights. Depending on your point of view, his works can seem like decorator samples for Prince of Chintz Mario Buatta, or Georgia O'Keefe on steroids.

Landscapes and cityscapes abound in the crystalline realm of photomicrography, some of them evocative of well-known painters. It's not difficult to spot the work of Lionel Feininger in this micrograph of doxorubin in methanol and dimethylbenzenesulfonic acid by the late Lars Bech, a frequent winner at Nikon's Small World, who managed to channel a variety of painterly styles in his chemical works.

Most of the 'landscapes' in this genre are delightfully eerie, such as the mountainscape with 'snow' at the bottom and bare 'earth' at the top. One work looks like a smoggy city at dawn; another like the Alps on acid. This lookalike effect is an important aspect of photomicrography's appeal, as tiny shocks of recognition jog our memory of similar, unrelated images from our own macro scale of vision.

Unlike drone photography, with photomicrography it's harder to separate the art of a subject from its scientific properties. Many of the biological images function on the level of illustration or graphic design rather than art. And yet, the knowledge that these graphics are generated from non-human sources is enough to elicit an aesthetic reaction even of the lowest order. The aesthetic punch here is something new, incorporating the duality of the image as both mysterious (art) and revelatory (science).

As Siwanowicz sees it: ' Although it is not the primary objective of scientific visual data, surprisingly many research-related images have aesthetic merit; to fully appreciate the beauty of those often abstract and surreal forms one needs to approach them with an open mind.'

The only man-made canvases I can think of that approach this duality are the works of Anselm Kiefer, whose art astounds at the primary level of aesthetic impact, and simultaneously draws us inexorably into the properties of the materials he uses-their implied brutality, their fragility, their complicated metaphorical physicality-the supporting players in the thematic impulses of his work.

So close in, it becomes even more apparent that nature operates on algorithmic principles, its matter programmed for repetitions and patterns that occur according to plan, its architecture addressing specific issues just like ours does, its designs turning function into surprising form and texture. A multifunctional beetle foot demonstrates just how all those different algorithms can peacefully coexist, fitting themselves neatly into a gestalt without crowding, or cancelling, each other out. It makes you wonder: What if nature is merely an AI experiment carried out on a random blue planet like ours, by an alien intelligence? A god-player like ourselves? Is this why things can and do go wrong? Algorithms are only human after all...or natural...or alien.

''Nothing's new under the sun.' This old warhorse should finally be put out to pasture in light of our closer scrutiny of nature's genius. The little shop of wonders we can now access is nothing compared to what remains to be discovered and documented for posterity, requiring many more lifetimes than we probably have left on this earth. Will this be the age of postmodern Romanticism, glorifying nature in a new dimension that slowly opens its cabinet of tiny curiosities for us to see? Is there a new aesthetic afoot which fuses the 'aha' of aesthetic experience with that of scientific wonderment? According to Vishniac, ' Philosophically speaking, there's no difference between art and biology. '

Dante Alighieri goes further: ' Nature is the art of God, ' (or that god-player out there in the ether). Thanks to micrographic technology and its visionary disciples, we're one step closer to seeing what he means.
This is the second of two articles on new ways of seeing. The first can be read here.
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by Brooks Riley Sometime in the late Fifties, Roman Vishniac, a pioneer of photomicrography, picked up a knife, cut a thick horizontal slice of skin from his own thumb and photographed it under a microscope using polarized light. The resulting image succeeded on two levels: the scientific parsing of human skin's rich textural terrain; and...

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How to Visit an Art Museum

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For some people, setting foot in an art museum can feel like dropping your phone in the toilet or showing up to a party not knowing a soul: a source of dread above all else.

It's not without reason. For all of their enriching attributes - showcasing art as creative expression, art as protest, art as therapy or proxy for cultural understanding  - art museums can be intimidating. To someone without an art background, they can seem like aloof, pretentious ivory towers or puzzles uninterested in being solved. And learning how to be comfortable and engaged in an art museum isn't exactly something that's widely taught.

Which is too bad, because the ability to navigate one is a skill in itself - and learning it can make the experience more approachable, and even enjoyable, to those who might otherwise shy away. Below, museum curators offer tips for beginners who want to appreciate an art museum but don't know where to begin. Consider this your primer on how to think about thinking about art.

Relax

As a first step, remember that there's no "right" way to experience art. It may sound like a cop-out, but the art museum experience really is yours to create. It's a personal endeavor, and it's totally acceptable to leave a museum without having been profoundly moved by that collection of Flemish masters or sculptures made from upcycled materials.

It's also totally acceptable to go in blind. "You don't need to know anything before you go to an art museum," says Lisa Çakmak, associate curator of ancient art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. "I'm 100 percent positive no one who walks into the zoo thinks, 'I should know something about hippos before I go to the zoo.' No, you just go and look at the hippos."

In the same way, a visit to an art museum can be guided entirely by what sparks your curiosity in the moment. "Do you love the color red? And do you see something where the artist used a lot of red and that really moved you?" Çakmak says. "That's great. You can stop there, and you don't have to ask any more questions if you don't want to."

Notice What Grabs You

If, however, you do want to ask more questions during your experience, try turning your focus inward. Before delving into the artist's intent or trying to puzzle through technique and what it all means, start with what you have a visceral reaction to, Çakmak says, whether that reaction is positive or negative. Probe your own response to figure out more specifically what has caught your attention: If it's a painting, do you like that its brushstrokes are articulated or that you can identify a familiar figure or landscape? If you're listening to an audio description or guided tour, what details resonated?

Or consider the interplay between a piece and its surrounding environment, says Anita Feldman, deputy director for curatorial affairs and education at the San Diego Museum of Art. At her workplace, for example, Francisco Zúñiga's bronze sculpture Mother and Daughter Seated is situated beneath a tree, creating an intimate setting for the viewer. "It's a quiet piece," she says.

Similarly, challenging yourself to explore works you don't like or understand might mean seeking information on the artist. It can be an interesting entry point to why a work's aesthetics are the way they are, Çakmak says.

Above all, "don't be afraid to develop your own opinion or interpretation," advises Kathryn Hall, a curator at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. It's a worthwhile exercise to examine your reaction to a piece of art, but you shouldn't feel the need to try to change it.

Ask for Help

Still, what if you just don't get it?

"Connect with a museum staff member" who can expand on context, like why a piece is important and what the artist's message is, Hall says. She also suggests chatting up your fellow museumgoers for a different perspective - or, if you're alone or on the shyer side, using technology to help you out. "If I see something I like and there's no blurb there, I'll just Google it. There's no reason why you can't use the technology at hand to enhance your visit," Çakmak says.

Ultimately, the goal should be to leave the museum more curious than you were going in. "You may come in to unwind and look at something beautiful, but you might stumble across something that surprises you that you can explore further," Feldman says. "I think it's good to stretch ourselves." It takes willpower to sit with something you don't understand and work through your discomfort.

And that persistence can pay off, Hall adds, by giving you a new way to express yourself or understand the world around you. "Some situations are hard to articulate - an emotion, idea, experience. Art can succeed in this space."

Although plumbing the depths of your psyche gets exhausting, even for experts. "I have a threshold of two hours," Çakmak says, "and then I need a snack."

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The Amateur's Guide to Visiting an Art Museum - Member Feature Stories - Medium

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For some people, setting foot in an art museum can feel like dropping your phone in the toilet or showing up to a party not knowing a soul: a source of dread above all else. It's not without reason.

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Many philosophical questions about the arts would benefit from some serious empirical research. One thinker who welcomed empirical findings was the art historian E H Gombrich (1909-2001), who was influenced by findings in experimental psychology showing that perception is a matter of inference rather than direct seeing. But all too often philosophers have relied on intuitions and hunches without seeking information about how people actually interact with works of art. If we want to understand the arts, it's time to take experimental psychology seriously.

Today, experimental philosophers and philosophically inclined psychologists are designing experiments that can help to answer some of the big philosophical questions about the nature of art and how we experience it - questions that have puzzled people for centuries, such as: why do we prefer original works of art to forgeries? How do we decide what is good art? And does engaging with the arts make us better human beings?

Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, believed to have been painted by Johannes Vermeer in the 17th century, hung in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam for seven years; in 1937, it was admired by the Vermeer expert Abraham Bredius as ' the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft'. But in 1945, Han van Meegeren confessed that he had forged this painting (and many others), and should thus be deemed as great an artist as Vermeer. But this did not happen. The same work formerly revered was now derided.

There are two kinds of art forgeries: invented forgeries in the style of an established artist, and copy forgeries, which are reproductions of existing works. Most commonly, forgers such as van Meegeren produce invented forgeries. Copy forgeries are less common; these are more difficult to get away with since it is often known where the original resides. Moreover, because it is impossible to make a perfect copy by hand, one can always see (or hope to see) differences between the original and the copy, and use these differences to disparage the copy. The art critic Clive Bell in 1914 suggested that exact copies always lack life: the lines and forms in the original are caused by emotions in the artist's mind that are not present in the copier's mind. The philosopher Nelson Goodman in 1976 argued that, even if we can detect no physical difference between the original and the copy, just knowing that one painting is the original and the other is the copy tells us that there could be subtle differences that we cannot see now but that we might learn to see later. This knowledge shapes our aesthetic experience of what we believe to be a direct copy.

The puzzle posed by forgery is this: why does our perception and evaluation of an artwork change simply by learning it is a forgery? After all, the work itself has not changed. Philosophers have taken two broad positions on this question.

According to the formalist position, when the original and the forgery are visually indistinguishable, they are not aesthetically different. For example, Monroe Beardsley in 1959 argued that we should form our aesthetic judgments only by attending to the perceptual properties of the picture before us, and not by considering when or how the work was made or who it was made by. So why did people change their evaluation of the Vermeer painting once van Meegeren confessed to being the artist? According to Alfred Lessing, writing in 1965, this response can be chalked up to social pressures: 'Considering a work of art aesthetically superior because it is genuine, or inferior because it is forged, has little or nothing to do with aesthetic judgment or criticism. It is rather a piece of snobbery.' This view assumes that artworks have perceptual properties that are unaffected by our knowledge about the background of the work.

According to the historicist position, what we perceive in a work is influenced by what we know about it. Despite the original and the forgery being visually indistinguishable, they are aesthetically different precisely because of what the formalists deny is relevant - our beliefs about who made the work, when, and how. The German critic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s argued that our aesthetic response takes into account the object's history, 'its unique existence in a particular place'. He believed that a forgery has a different history and thus lacks the 'aura' of the original. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto took a similar historicist position in 1964 when he asked us to consider why a Brillo box by Andy Warhol that is visually identical to a Brillo box in a supermarket is a work of art. To determine that the box in the museum is a work of art 'requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld'. Denis Dutton claimed in 2009 that we perceive a forgery to be aesthetically inferior to an original because we take into account the kind of achievement the work represents - the artist's process - and a forgery represents a lesser kind of achievement than an original.

Psychologists have stepped into the fray to determine how much the label 'forgery' affects our response to a work of art - and, if so, why. The first question is easier to answer than the second. Studies show that just telling people that a work is a forgery (or even the less-charged term 'copy') causes them to rate that work lower on a host of aesthetic dimensions. Artworks labelled forgeries or copies are rated as less good, less beautiful, less awe-inspiring, less interesting, lower in monetary value, and even physically smaller than the same image shown to other respondents as an 'original'. In addition, brain activation changes: while the visual areas of the brain didn't change in response to whether Rembrandt paintings were labelled 'authentic' or 'copy', the label 'authentic' resulted in greater activation of the orbitofrontal cortex - an area associated with reward and monetary gain.

Clearly, people don't behave how the formalists thought that they should. What is causing their appreciation to be diminished? One possibility is that our sense of forgery's moral evil unconsciously influences our aesthetic response. Another is that our knowledge of forgery's worthlessness on the art market has the same kind of unconscious effect. But if we could strip forgery of its connection with deception and lack of monetary value, would it still be devalued? And, if so, can we demonstrate that the historicist position is correct?

With my research team, I put this to the test by showing people two duplicate images of an unfamiliar art work side by side, telling them that the painting on the left was the first in a planned series of 10 identical works by a painter. Participants were then told one of three different stories about who made the work on the right: that it was by the artist, by the artist's assistant, or by a forger. For those told it was the artist's assistant, we specified that the assistant's copy had the artist's stamp on it, and that having a team of assistants was typical artistic practice (hence not fraudulent). The auction price of $53,000 was listed below all images (right and left) except for the forgery, which was listed at only $200.

We asked people to rate the copy relative to the original on six dimensions:

Which one is more creative?
Which one do you like more?
Which one is more original?
Which one is more beautiful?
Which one is the better work of art?
Which one is more likely to be influential?

Responses fell into two categories: broadly evaluative (what formalists called aesthetic) - with reference to beauty, goodness and liking; and historical-evaluative (what historicists called historical) - with reference to creativity, originality and influence. We reasoned that forgeries would always be the most devalued of the three kinds of copies because of their immorality and their lack of monetary worth. The artist's copy, however, is like a forgery without these two marks against it. Thus, our key comparison was between responses to the artist's versus the assistant's copy, relative to the original.

We found that, on broadly evaluative dimensions, the artist's and the assistant's copies were rated identically - with no distinctions in beauty, liking or goodness. Thus, our participants behaved like formalists. Previous studies reporting lower beauty ratings for images labelled forgeries had presented works one at a time. But here, when the original and the forgery were presented simultaneously, people were forced to concede that there was no beauty difference.

Even a copy of a Vermeer by Vermeer makes us feel like we are communing with Vermeer

On historical-evaluative ratings, however, the story was different. People rated the assistant's copy as less creative, original and influential than the artist's copy - even though both works were copies, both signed by the artist, and both worth the same monetarily. People now behaved as historicists, consistent with Danto's position that visually identical Brillo boxes are not artistically identical.

These findings tell us that, when moral and monetary considerations are ruled out, there is still something wrong with a forgery. It's not quite what Dutton thought, because while an original certainly represents a different kind of achievement from a forgery, there is really no difference in achievement between an artist's copy and an assistant's copy. Both are copies, after all. So what is it that's wrong then?

I submit that it's the aura that Benjamin talked about, which is dependent most critically on who made the work. Benjamin's idea of 'aura' is consistent with what psychologists call essentialism - the view that certain special objects (eg, my wedding ring, or my childhood teddy bear) gain their identity from their history, and have an underlying nature that cannot be directly observed, a view developed extensively by the psychologist Susan Gelman. This is why we reject perfect replicas of such objects: we want the original. We appear to treat works of art this way too - as if they contain the essence of the artist, or the artist's mind. We prefer the copy by the artist to the copy by the assistant because only the former contains that essence. This leads to the conclusion that just knowing that we are looking at a painting by Vermeer (even if it is a copy of a Vermeer by Vermeer) makes us feel like we are communing with Vermeer. Do we really want to find out that we were actually communing with van Meegeren?

These findings predict that we will not respond well to what the future is bringing us: three-dimensional prints of paintings virtually indistinguishable from the originals, and works of art generated by computers. These works will not allow us to infer the mind of the human artist.

The American art critic Peter Schjeldahl put this well when he wrote in 2008:

The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness - the will to believe - without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn't.

If we read into a work of art the artist's decisions, as Schjeldahl writes, then we are inferring a mind behind the work. Can we do this for abstract art? And, if so, can this help us distinguish art by great abstract expressionists from superficially similar art by children and animals?

Tension between those who revere and those who deride abstract art can be seen even among the most highly regarded art historians. In Art and Illusion (2000), Gombrich focused on representational art as a great human achievement, and disparaged abstract art as a display of the artist's personality rather than skill. Contrast this to the attitude of the late American art historian Kirk Varnedoe, who was chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art from 1988 to 2001. In Pictures of Nothing (2006), Varnedoe responds explicitly to Gombrich's challenge, writing that abstract art is a signal human achievement created in a new language, and filled with symbolic meaning. The 'mind-boggling range of drips, stains, blobs, blocks, bricks, and blank canvases' seen in museums of modern art are not random spills, he wrote. Rather, like all works of art, they are 'vessels of human intention' and they 'generate meaning ahead of naming'. They represent a series of deliberate choices by the artist, and involve invention and evoke meanings - for example, energy, space, depth, repetition, serenity, discord.

Chimps, monkeys and elephants have all been given paints, brushes and paper on which to make marks. And their paintings, like those of preschoolers, bear a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionist paintings. Who hasn't heard someone deride abstract art as requiring no skill at all, with statements such as 'My kid could have done that!'

We wanted to find out whether people see more than they think they do in abstract art - whether they can see the mind behind the work. We created pairs of images that looked eerily alike at first glance. Each pair consisted of a painting by a famous abstract expressionist whose works were found in at least one major art-history textbook (eg, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline and others) and a painting either by a child or a nonhuman animal (chimp, gorilla, monkey or elephant). The question we asked was whether people would prefer, and judge as better, works by artists over works by children and animals. And, if so, on what basis?

People see more than they think in abstract art - they see the mind behind the work

We set up the study so that people first saw 10 pairs of paintings without any labels revealing who made them, followed by 20 more pairs with authorship information under each image: one labelled 'artist' and the other labelled 'child', 'chimp', 'gorilla', 'monkey' or 'elephant'. Of these 20, half were randomly labelled correctly, and half incorrectly (thus a Hofmann painting might have been labelled 'child'). If people can't distinguish between works by artists and by untrained children and animals, we should expect chance to play a part in their responses to the first 10 unlabelled pairs, which would mean choosing works by artists they liked more or saw as better only 50 per cent of the time. But this did not happen. For both the like and the better questions, participants selected the works by artists at an above-chance level. And when our respondents chose a work by an artist as better or preferred, they often explained their choice by referring to the mind behind the work, saying that it looked more thought-out, intentional and planned. Such mentalistic explanations were significantly more frequent following the choice of the artist's actual work (whatever the label).

We have repeated this experiment in different ways - for example, presenting the works one at a time rather than in pairs, and asking which is by the artist vs the child or animal - and we find that, overall, people are correct about two-thirds of the time, a rate that is significantly above chance responding. Most importantly, when we asked people to rate each image on the dimension of perceived intentionality (without telling them that some were by children and animals), we found that those by artists received significantly higher intentionality ratings. This led us to conclude that people see more than they think they see in abstract art - they see the mind behind the work, and this is what leads them to distinguish between works by artists and by children or animals, and what leads them to classify artists' works as better.

Moreover, when people do make mistakes, they are operating on the basis of perceived intentionality: those artists' works rated as low in intentionality get misidentified as having been done by children or animals; and those works by children and animals rated high in intentionality get misidentified as done by artists. What this shows is that we evaluate abstract art by inferring (rightly or wrongly) the mind behind the art. Just as we evaluate an original as better than a forgery because we infer the mind of the original master behind the original work.

Another area in the philosophy of art that can be illuminated by the findings of experimental psychology is the question of whether studying the arts has the 'transfer' effect of making us better people. It is indeed plausible to assume that reading particular works of literature about particular kinds of injustices might arouse in us feelings of empathy, not just for the characters, but also for real individuals who might be in the same kinds of situations as the fictional ones. This is a view that is often promulgated, but rarely with evidence.

Colson Whitehead, the author of The Underground Railroad (2016), a powerful novel about slavery, reported that a stranger told him: 'Your book made me a more empathetic person.' The claim that the narrative arts make us more empathic seems highly plausible: we project ourselves into fictional characters and simulate what they are experiencing. Where better to step into the shoes of another than with works of literature, where we can meet a wide variety of people, all so different from ourselves? Referring to the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, Martha Nussbaum wrote in Cultivating Humanity (1997): 'It is impossible to care about the characters and their wellbeing in the way the text invites, without having some very definite political and moral interests awakened in oneself.'

Not all would agree. The literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in 2000 that: 'The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply.' The philosopher Gregory Currie speculates that when we expend empathy on fictional characters, our empathy for actual people is depleted. William James seems to have had the same idea when in 1892 he asked us to imagine 'the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside'. This is reminiscent of Kwame Anthony Appiah's description in 2008 of Catholic seminarians who have just heard a lecture on the Good Samaritan - and then rush right past someone in need when they realise they're late for the next lecture. After leaving the fictional world, have we paid our empathy dues?

The Germany that led to Hitler was reading Goethe and listening to Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'

Experimental psychologists have begun to seek evidence of fiction's power to induce empathy. In one study, after reading a story about an injustice committed against an Arab-Muslim woman, participants were less likely to categorise angry ambiguous-race faces as Arab. But did this translate into kinder behaviour? This was not examined. In another study, after reading an excerpt from Harry Potter about stigma, children reported more positive attitudes about immigrant children at their school. But note that this change of mind (or heart) occurred only for children who identified with Harry, and only after a discussion of the reading with their teacher - and this might have been the deciding factor. Meanwhile, after reading a story about a character behaving prosocially, participants were more willing to help the experimenter pick up accidentally dropped pens. But note that picking up dropped pens is very low-cost helping, and we have no idea how long such an inclination to help lasts.

If we just go by the studies carried out so far, I would have to come down on the side of the skeptics. The evidence is there only for very near and very immediate transfer - prosocial stories written by experimenters make us think and act more prosocially (often quite similarly to how the characters thought and acted) immediately after reading and, in one case, also after discussing the story's themes. These near-transfer connections are not particularly generalisable to actual literature, since most literature does not carry a moral lesson. And remember that the Germany which led to Hitler was one of the most literate societies, reading Goethe and listening to Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' by night.

And yet, I am not ready to conclude that there might be no link between reading certain works of literature and becoming more empathic. I make here a plea for more and better research on the effects of literature on compassion. Great literature allows us to get inside the lives of people we would never meet in real life. I would wager that if we could do the study right, we could show that reading Dickens not only makes us feel what it is like to be a penniless, hungry and unjustly treated child, but also more likely to help children in such conditions too - if the opportunity to help presents itself.

Similarly, what might be the effect of reading Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862) - especially the scene where Jean Valjean, just released from years of hard labour for stealing food to feed his sister's child, steals silverware from the bishop who has taken him in - and when Valjean is caught, the bishop gives him two candlesticks too, as a gift? Here we see the cruel effects of injustice and the potential life-giving results of kindness. Might this make a judge more likely to be lenient in sentencing certain kinds of crimes? Of course, there would be cases of people who don't react this way. No one would claim that there is a necessary link between reading Dickens and Hugo, and compassion for the poor and outrage at injustice. But reading Dickens and Hugo just might nudge some of us to be more compassionate, and that is all we would need in order to make the case that literature has the power to induce compassion.

I have discussed three philosophical questions about art that can be addressed empirically: why do we disparage once-revered artworks when they are outed as forgeries? How do we judge quality in abstract art? And does entering a narrative world make us more empathetic once we exit that world? Of course, not all philosophical claims about art can be studied empirically. No experiment could give conclusive answers to ontological questions such as What is art? or What is beauty? But the philosophical problems discussed here are inherently psychological ones. When a philosophical claim is about how the mind works, then that claim is not immune to psychological data, and it is incumbent upon philosophers to consider whether psychologists' answers are satisfactory.
How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration by Ellen Winner is published via Oxford University Press.

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How experimental psychology can help us understand art | Aeon Essays

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Many philosophical questions about the arts would benefit from some serious empirical research. One thinker who welcomed empirical findings was the art historian E H Gombrich (1909-2001), who was influenced by findings in experimental psychology showing that perception is a matter of inference rather than direct seeing.

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Schama Picasso

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Simon Schama's Power of Art - Part 3 of 8, Picasso (2007) (HD)

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Watch Simon Schama's Power of Art - Part 3 of 8, Picasso (2007) (HD) - jamesyireland on dailymotion