The Polymath Manifesto is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, January 01, 2004. It is part of The Epistemology Exhibition.
A benighted meditation on the nature of art and science.
The title image is a detail taken from a self-portrait drawn in charcoal by the author.Art has no fixed domain, range or tools — it is, rather, the product of the process of applying a series of aesthetic decisions within a domain. Art is, to put it in Chinese terms, kung fu; a phrase that translates to English as something like “skill that transcends surface beauty.”
Craft, or technical skill, is a set of learned proficiencies that can be applied to a domain of action and thus to the creation of art. An improvement in craft grants one a greater range of aesthetic options from which to choose.
Technique, because it allows the artist more creative options, is important, but it also presents a hazard: several disciplines, including the training régimes of orchestral musicians and opera singers, emphasize craft to a potentially dangerous extreme. In such cases the practitioner is likely to fall prey to the mistaken belief that the craft upon which they spend so much time is itself the art.
Fine art, as opposed to low art — an empty exhibition of craft — can be recognized by its effect on the beholder. The feeling one experiences while interacting with great art is a sublime and seemingly contradictory intersection between surprise and inevitability. One comes to understand that the work, whatever it might be, is unique unto itself and cannot have been otherwise in any meaningful detail without robbing it of its quiddity.
The artist is first distinguished by an exquisite sensitivity to aesthetics. This sensitivity results in appreciation and selectivity, a very closely held sense of taste, and, often, a boorish disregard for the sensibilities of others. Taste alone is not sufficient: good taste without a sense of being unserved by available aesthetic options leads one to become a connoisseur rather than an artist.
The will to create art is inspired by a disatisfaction within the artist; a longing for something the world does not provide him. Restif de la Bretonne had his much celebrated foot fetish, Cezanne his miopia. They saw things as others did not and they remade the world either as they saw it or as they wanted to see it. It is this combination of sensitivity and willingness to tailor the world to suit him that marks the artist.
The spark of creativity that allows this imaginative reframing of reality is the same spark that allows inventors to reframe physical reality. In either case it is a reaction to mental adversity that necessitates invention — whether the adversity that provides the impetus is some onerous and enervating form of repetitive labor or the absence from the world of some longed-for form of beauty.
Invention, whether of artistic works or new technologies, requires the same imposition of Self upon the world. Leonardo di Vinci was as much a scientist as a painter; the Dutch Masters would have been lesser creatures had they lacked the knowledge of chemistry with which to create new pigments; Plato the philosopher cannot be understood without studying Plato the mathematician.
We live during the first age of recorded history in which art and science are regarded as wholly separate, even adversarial, things. This is, at least in part, due to the ill-advised partitioning of numerate scientific pedagogy from the classical humanist tradition. Through the office of beaurocrats we have sanctioned the creation of a generation of scientists who have technology as their only art and no philosophy with which to understand the implications of their creations. This is an ill auger for the future of our culture.
I hope to lead the charge of polymath Renaissance geeks who’ve read the ancient Greeks in a mission to overturn this trend and reunite l’arts et métiers.