Hand and fingers

When I look at a hand do I see the five fingers? When I look at the fingers do I see the hand? Can I look at all the fingers at once?

Objects and matter

Sol LeWitt, 1972

Objects are often spoken of as if they were material — in contrast to immaterial things like thoughts, feelings, spirits, and so on. Yet contemporary physics does not support this distinction, at least not in any absolute sense.

1. Objects are composed of atoms, sub-atomic particles, etc. which are effectively voids punctuated by miniscule fields of energetic vibration. Objects are not made of solid 'stuff'.

2. Our experience of objects — of the hard, material world — consists entirely of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, etc. In other words, they are immaterial.

3. These thoughts, sensations, etc. are composed of the very same atoms and particles that are largely void.

We cannot draw anything other than a provisional distinction between the material and the immaterial.

Entropy and art: resisting the probable

Martin Creed's Work No. 850

Nutritious food is highly improbable, i.e. farthest from entropy, and we import the organised energy it contains in order to maintain our own equilibrium far from entropy, and avoid death. Therefore, in biological and evolutionary terms, we would be predisposed to be attracted to objects that are highly improbable. Simplistically put, beauty lies in the least probable arrangement of matter.

Works of art might conform to this criteria — insofar as they embody prodigious amounts of skill (effort in relation to time) to produce. This makes them highly improbable, at least in the case of the best. The fact that some works of art appear to require little or no skill to produce — in the traditional sense — may lead some to deny their value. However, any contemporary artists who attract such criticism use their skill and knowledge to play a different game. Using the well-established expectations of the viewing public they design events that are highly improbable within the context of art, and its normal codes of presentation.

One might say of an artwork, "Given what I know about art it is unlikely that x constitutes a work of art", and the skill of the artist lay in manufacturing something that confounded this expectation. From the artist's point of view, they are just doing what artists have always done: producing artefacts that resist the probable.

Impulse to action

If you think it sounds like a good idea, don't do it.