Realism and ugliness

I want to talk about something which is far far away from math, and far far away from science.  I want to talk about aesthetics, and my own sense of aesthetics in particular.  (Of course, I've already written my magnum opus on aesthetics, but perhaps the subject would benefit from a less facetious treatment.)

I've realized that what I like in art is a reflection of reality.  Not a realistic reflection of reality necessarily, but a reflection nonetheless.

For example, my favorite novel of the past year was The Unconsoled, which takes place in a sort of nightmarish dreamscape, with the story frequently wrapping around in a circle only to contradict itself.  That book had some deep things to say about social obligations, and the lies we tell ourselves to justify random happenstance.

The idea of reflecting reality, without being realistic, is also embodied in another aesthetic, that of "gritty realism".  I think of the ur-example of gritty realism to be The Dark Knight.  I think you'll agree that The Dark Knight is not realistic, but is perhaps meant to invoke uncomfortable truths about reality.  Like when Batman is forced to choose between his girlfriend or the mayor, that's keeping it real, or something.

One justification for the realism aesthetic:  "Yes it's ugly.  But the truth is ugly."

But that sounds wrong to me, or whatever the equivalent of "wrong" is when we discuss aesthetics.  For me, it's not that the truth is ugly.  It's that beauty is ugly.

What is beauty?  Beauty is a subjective judgment we make about real objects, even though the objects themselves have no intrinsic beauty about them.  Beauty is a lie.

It's more than that.  Beauty is a social lie.  When something is beautiful, we are all supposed to find it beautiful.  For instance, as a scientist, I am supposed to sing praise for the beauty of science.

The Pale Blue Dot, a famous image of Earth as viewed from space.

The above image is ugly.  Because beauty is ugly.  Beauty is social coercion.  I don't need to share Carl Sagan's aesthetics.  Fuck that.

Of course, I say this while simultaneously recognizing that Saturn's rings are actually very pretty.  And don't you know that even as I profess the ugliness of prettiness, I post a lot of pretty photos of origami every month.  No one said aesthetics need to be logically consistent.  It's not mathematics.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of value in subverting conventional aesthetics.  On the social level, popular aesthetics can be a great evil.  Like the idea that white men are, aesthetically speaking, the best hero protagonists, and the most relatable characters in general.  Or the cultural designation of a particular body type as attractive.  Or the fact that culture which is popular among lower classes or marginalized groups is systematically considered uncool (for example, see what happened to Disco).  The beauty we have here in society is ugly.

Aesthetics are an expression of inner emotions, a thing that cannot be fully justified, or countered, with rational argument.  Sometimes the best way to fight aesthetics is with aesthetics.

These things do not exist

This is part of my series on debugging the ontological argument.

In the previous post in the series, I explained why existence is not a predicate.  Or if it is a predicate, then it is tautological and meaningless.

However, here is a rebuttal in song form (song starts at 1:35):



My transcript:

Perfect circles, three-sided squares, and two nested pairs with just one number,
Isaac Newton's fourth law of motion, rivers and oceans on the moon,
Easter Sunday in the fall, and Pope John Paul the sixth or seventh,
Also the last digit of pi, or large dragonflies that eat baboons.

Or what about elves and unicorns, or cranberries grown with pairs of thorns,
Or trash double cheesecakes laced with thorns, these things do not exist.
And don't forget objectivity, and non-oppressive authority,
Or equal opportunity, these things do not exist.

I'm quite impressed with our little list, though I think we missed a thing or two,
So not to sound too over-rehearsed, but we'll sing more verses after this.

So what about life without suffering, or a moment when nobody's dying, or a
Flower immune from withering, oh these things do not exist.
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, American nuclear arms reduction,
Women safe from my powers of seduction, these do not exist.

Or restaurants in California where you legally can smoke, or pitless peaches, orange celery, or heartless artichokes,
or Chia pets that look like Howard Taft or Howard Stern, the Antarctic Badminton League, or gasoline that does not burn.
Or lengthy treatises on existential thought by dinosaurs, or belly-button-flavored jello, Japanese conquistadors,
September 33rd or 50th or 91st, or flying submarines, or talking plants, or meatless liverwurst.

Or oceanfront property in Zimbabwe, Orthodox Jews that speak God's name Yahweh,
Truffles or mushrooms with vertebrae, these things do not exist.
Or cellular phones from 1910, or monsters in closets, or boogeymen,
or cigarettes without carcinogens, these things do not ex--

Eggs as large as Mars, cherry-flavored cars, ninety string guitars, immortal
armadillos, paint chip pillows, billion kilo cigarillos, real Fox News sans point of views, or fake tattoos held on with screws, or duct tape zoos, or argon shoes, or cheap canoes made from kazoos, or free shampoos from kangaroos,
twelve-handed clocks, magic beanstalks, woodless woodblocks, NASA space walks on Earth, or sock puppets made without any actual socks.

One-line sonnets, eight-legged snakes, and beer-flavored lakes in Minnesota,
Cat-scan goggles, monks singing chants in tight leather pants, and
Finally not least of all, an utterly exhaustive list of things that don't exist!

The above song was inspired by a lovely Dinosaur Comic.

If existence is not a predicate, how do any of the above statements make sense?  Read on to find out.

Christmas music

This is that most wonderful time of the year when we all ask the question: Is it ethical for society to subject us all to music that some people enjoy, and others do not?

Sure, some people have a net gain from the music.  Probably even most people.  In fact, it's probably a net gain overall.  But if the gain requires coercively harming a minority, is it truly worthwhile?  It's sort of like the Omelas situation, where the success of a utopia relies on perpetually torturing a little kid.

I'm being facetious here, and anyway the rest of the year we're subjected to pop music.

Lately I've been listening to Penderecki.  He's a living classical composer, considered influential in the avant-garde movement.  Here's one of his most famous pieces, from 1960:



Do you think it would be ethical to play this music in public spaces?

In case you prefer something a little more tonal, later on Penderecki moved away from avant-garde music, and composed things like this Christmas Symphony:


It sounds practically like 19th century music.

Personal thoughts on the four campfires of art

Scott McCloud is a cartoonist, and the leading theorist of comic arts.  In his book Making Comics, McCloud proposed the idea of the "four campfires of art", also known as "tribes of art" or "passions of art".  It's a way of dividing art or artists into four types.  But perhaps it's better understood as dividing art into four aspirations, since any particular artist or work of art can draw from multiple campfires.

For a description of the four campfires, here's a good blog post, or you can see what McCloud himself says in his TED talk or in this interview.

Image taken from McCloud's TED talk.

In addition to those links, I offer a very brief description:

• Classicists focus on beauty, and mastery of the artform.
• Animists focus on content, trying to present their story or ideas in the clearest way possible.
• Formalists focus on form, exploring the contours of the medium.
• Iconoclasts focus on truth, especially by targeting artistic conventions which gloss over truth.

Though McCloud is coming from the perspective of comics, they also may apply to other art forms, such as fine arts, literature, movies, music, and video games.

I find these four campfires to be personally validating, so much to the extent that I cannot offer any general commentary on them, and only offer my personal feelings.

I take one look at the four campfires, and it's blatantly obvious which one I fall into, both in my appreciation of art, and in my recent attempts to write a novel.  I'm an iconoclast. I really like fiction that deconstructs common tropes.  I like art that turns common moments into objects of fascination.  When I set out to write a novel, I end up writing a novel about a narrator whose major flaw is too much trust in tropes.

I also appreciate formalism and animism, but the campfire that is hardest for me to understand is classicism.  I think the category somewhat suffers from its association with "classic" art, because I think that most of the time when artwork gets immortalized as "classic", it's not because the artist set out to do so.

For example, is Shakespeare a classicist?  A lot of Shakespeare focuses on the details of the plot, and linguistic wit of the characters, both of which are animist values.  However, regardless of artistic intention, perhaps classicism is the main thing people get out of Shakespeare today, if only because the other values don't age as well.  I don't know, I don't really care for Shakespeare.  Or classic works in general, really.

I find the four campfires personally validating, because I really like art, but this is hard to explain when I'm not much into popular art, and dislike most classic art.  Also, my favorite thing to do with art is complain about it.  But it seems there's still a place for me at one of the campfires.

Which of the four campfires would you say you value most?

An atonal earworm

I have a fondness for 20th century classical music, because that's when composers really start to peel off the layers of conventional tonality.  That said, I am not sure I'm a fan of twelve-tone serialism, which is the musical movement that went the farthest in the quest to defeat tonality.

Serialist composers would constrain their music such that it would go through every one of the twelve tones before coming back to the first one.  The sequence of twelve tones is called a "tone row".  This was intended to prevent it from being in any particular key.  For example you couldn't say it's in the key of C, because C is only ever played within a tone row with other equally important notes.  But oddly, this constraint often isn't sufficient to defeat tonality.  Even when you have a random sequence of twelve notes, our minds tend to pick out some pattern, and fit it into a key.

Mathemusician Vi Hart has a great video about serialism, which includes a few serialist compositions that are intentionally tonal:



Vi Hart talks a bit about The Owl and the Pussycat, a song by Igor Stravinsky.  But she doesn't play it because it's copyrighted.  But there are other people are willing to violate copyright, so here it is:



But before I move on, I have to talk about these silly lyrics. I was disappointed to learn that Stravinsky didn't write them himself.  Instead, they come from a poem by Edward Lear:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

   In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

   Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

   And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

    What a beautiful Pussy you are,

         You are,

         You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

The rest of the poem describes how the owl and pussycat buy a ring from a pig and get married by a turkey.  Mysteries in the poem abound:  How can they spend a year and a day searching for a ring right after the pussycat delivers the line, "too long we have tarried"?  Why do they only get one ring: which of the two will wear it?   What is a runcible spoon?  I thought the incongruities were just too absurd, until I remembered that "rockabye baby" is a lullaby about a baby falling to its death.

As for Stravinsky's music, it sounds like all the notes are wrong.  But I may have an unusual opinion: I think it is catchy.  As in, I literally caught the singer's melody in my head.  I had a serialist earworm.

This raises the question of whether my earworm accurately reflects the song.  Is it truly an atonal earworm?  Or is my mind interpreting the music as being in a particular key?

This can be tested with an experiment!  A couple days after listening to the song, I transcribed it from memory.  Then I transcribed the original song, almost finishing the first stanza before giving up.  Here are the results:

Each line represents one of Stravinsky's tone rows.  In blue is Stravinsky's tone row (I ignore repeated notes for simplicity).  The other colors show the corresponding notes that were in my earworm.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my earworm is full of inaccuracies.  Besides getting a bunch of notes just wrong, there are also a few sections that were shifted up or down by an interval.  There are also some missing parts.  I hadn't at all remembered the line, "And sang to a small guitar."  And lastly, my earworm gets completely derailed in the last line ("What a beautiful pussy...").

The last line is different from the others, because it's not really a tone row.  The note F is repeated three times!  D# and F# are also repeated.  Perhaps Stravinsky didn't follow tone rows strictly.  Or I transcribed the notes wrong (transcription is hard).  Or the singer sung the wrong notes (who would know?).  In any case, there's one part of the line that stands out as having conventional tonality: the sequence C#, A#, B ("-ssy you are!").  This is called an "authentic cadence", and it tends to establish a key of B.

The authentic cadence is such a strong structure that it appeared in my earworm, albeit shifted to the key of D.  And then it seems like the entire line got derailed into a key of D major.

No wonder my earworm is so inaccurate in this spot.

This leads me to conclude that while some parts of my earworm roughly represent the original, there's also a tendency for my mind to substitute the atonal melody with a tonal one.  This is more likely to occur as we get further into the song, since I tend to have a poorer memory of those parts.

I wonder if there is any research on how well earworms tend to reflect the songs that they come from.  I daresay that I would have a much easier time transcribing Lady Gaga from memory.

Scratch paper art

Oh, so I never really said how the math camp went. It was really cool. Some of the lessons were really interesting. The kids were a lot of fun, most of the time anyways.

And now, I have a large stack of used scratch paper.

I think scratch paper is an art. It is very chaotic, yet there are hidden patterns everywhere. It is at once simple yet complex. It is a glimpse of the human mind, frozen in time.

Let me show you some scraps.

If you look closely, you might see the puppies and kittens. Also, base Fibonacci.

Exactly what it looks like: a bunch of random circles.

I am not actually sure that having an ellipsis full of sigmas is proper notation.

If you try to guess what this is, you are doomed to fail. I think I was trying to draw a polyhedron?

This one is actually very straightforward. It has to do with quadratic residues.

Base Fibonacci returns! Now with arithmetic.

This is an abstract drawing of something more concrete--namely, a cyclic string of binary digits.

And that's it for now. Hope you've enjoyed it.

Double-pinned painting

Let's say you have a painting. As it happens, the painting is Magritte's Golconde. You apparently really like Magritte.

For mysterious reasons (hey, this is what you want, not me), you want to hang it up in a special way. Some string is attached to the painting, and you want to hang it on two pins that are in the wall. You want it such that removing either of the two pins will result in the string unwinding and the painting falling down. How can you do it?

After you've figured that out, there is a vastly more difficult problem to solve. See, you have Escher's Knots, and you want to hang it on the wall too...
Can you hang this on 3 pins such that removing any one will result in its fall? In a brief moment of insanity, you wonder, can you find a way to hang it on N pins such that the removal of any M pins will result in its fall?

There will, of course, be some difficulty in conveying a solution to me without pictures, but you're obviously very creative, so you can figure it out. I might add that the solution to any case with more than two pins is too hard to draw anyway.

Spoiler alert: Solution here

I see contemporary art

Quite a while ago, I visited a local art museum. I have a better appreciation for these things after I took an art history class in the summer. However, I only studied modern art, which refers to a period from around 1770 to 1940. The most interesting part of the museum for me was the contemporary (post-modern?) art exhibit. I don't understand what is up with art these days (after WWII). What is up with it?

There was some pretty cool stuff, like a creepy car sculpture. And there were also the stereotypical minimalist stuff like a blank canvas, an empty room, a glass cube. And then there's everything in-between. For example, there was a black canvas with a white rectangle in the middle, but upon closer inspection the rectangle was a detailed drawing of a house.

I think the minimalist stuff is what gives modern art a bad name in the public's mind. I'm inclined to agree with the critics. I mean, maybe the first time, it was novel and all. But there are only so many blank canvases you can see before they all look the same--just one. Unless you think it has some value outside of novelty, it's more or less worthless.

Oh! But here I am talking about it, which means that it must be good art! In my mind, this argument only really discredits its own premise. "Good" art does not mean "promoting discussion". Besides, if you think about it, this is just a very brief discussion of an entire category of artworks.

One thing that's good about minimalist art is that after thinking, "This is art?", my next thought is, "I should be an artist!" Behold! I call it The Net.
Forget rectangles! Hypercube net silhouettes are the new deal, because I, an artist, said so! And it's not "ms paint", it's my personal style! This piece is a perfect blend of minimalism, technology, and four-dimensional geometry. Did I mention that you have to see 261 of these "paintings" before you've seen them all?

Bonus points if you can identify the hypercube net in question. In fact, I'd be impressed if anyone had any clue what I'm talking about.

Art, Realism, and Science

Earlier, I had taken a class on the history of modern art. Now, I'm not a big fan of history. Frankly, I find it boring, especially ancient history. But one thing I've found interesting (and I've only seen this in college) is the history of ideas and culture. I liked the class on modern art not so much because of the art (I guess surrealism is good), but because art, especially in the modern art period, provides a cross-section into the ideas of each time.

Realism was an art movement that lasted from around 1850-1870. For those who don't know, the realist style consists mostly of paintings of peasants and workers from real life. For the class, I read an article (sorry, no reference available) which was talking about the Realist attitude towards all sorts of things including the subject of art, the technique of art, social classes, and science. It was that last one that caught my eye, of course. The author described Realist art as trying to become more like science (which would in turn become more like art). Since the goal of art was truth, artists would try to look at their subjects "objectively" and without emotion.

I disagree with the whole attitude about art's goal, but aside from that, I think the Realists have severely misunderstood science. Yes, science is objective, but it's not about objective observation. If a scientist claims that he has measured things "objectively" and without any passion, does that really carry any weight? How could we even measure how objective we are? Scientists are humans too, and they are not necessarily any more objective than anyone else. I might even argue that scientists must look at everything subjectively, through the lens of scientific theory, in order to make any sense of the world.

The way we get objective truths out of all this is we apply the scientific method. We correct for selection biases, use a control group, apply error analysis, have a peer-review process, etc. And then we test the results over and over again in case any mistakes were made the first time. Science distills objective truths from scientists' subjective experiences.

I think the attitude that scientists must observe "objectively" is what got us the useless notion of avoiding the first person in scientific reports. Just another reason to hate the idea.

To go back to the art, the objectivity really shows! See, it's no coincidence that peasants became a subject right at a time when people were worried about proletariat revolution, and around when the Communist Manifesto was published. Realism was first created by revolutionaries, but it was of course later adopted by people who took the opposing point of view. Look at The Gleaners by Jules Breton.


Yep, look at the happy peasants. They're not at all upset about being on the bottom of society and having to bend over all day to collect the last bits of grain. And what a benevolent supervisor (on the right) they have! Did I mention that since it's Realist, it must be the objective truth?

I wonder if this same attitude was reflected in scientists at the time or if it was just artists who thought this way. I hope it was just the artists.