The Art of Science
<p>One of my earliest blog essays (<a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200205#65'>Terror Becomes Bad<br />
Art</a>) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing &#8220;artist&#8221; who created<br />
a brief scare back in 2002.  Arguably more disturbing than Helder&#8217;s<br />
&#8220;art&#8221; was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none<br />
of the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with had<br />
ever taught him any better and his own talent was not sufficient to<br />
carry him beyond their limits.</p>
<p>I am not the first to observe that something deeply sick and<br />
dysfunctional happened to the relationship between art, popular<br />
culture, and technology during the crazy century we&#8217;ve just exited.<br />
Tom Wolfe made the point in <a href='http://www.billemory.com/NOTES/wolfe.html'>The Painted Word</a><br />
and expanded on it in <cite>From Bauhaus To Our House</cite>. Frederick Turner<br />
expanded the indictment in a <cite>Wilson Quarterly</cite> essay on<br />
neoclassicism which, alas, seems not to be available on line.</p>
<p>If we judge by what the critical establishment promotes as &#8220;great<br />
art&#8221;, most of today&#8217;s artists are bad jokes.  The road from Andy<br />
Warhol&#8217;s soup cans to Damien Hirst&#8217;s cows in formaldehyde has been<br />
neither pretty nor edifying.  Most of &#8220;fine art&#8221; has become a moral,<br />
intellectual, and esthetic wasteland in which whatever was originally<br />
healthy in the early-modern impulse to break the boundaries of<br />
received forms has degraded into a kind of numbed-out nihilism.</p>
<p>There are exceptions, though &mdash; artists who engage the world, who<br />
are deeply involved with ideas, and who playfully incorporate all the<br />
possibilities of our technological age into their work.  When I was a<br />
guest of honor at Arisia 2004 I had the good fortune to meet one of<br />
these; <a href='http://www.arthurganson.com'>Arthur Ganson</a>, an<br />
artist/engineer who creates beautiful and sometimes disturbing kinetic<br />
sculptures.</p>
<p>One that I&#8217;ve just discovered is <a href='http://www.bathsheba.com/artist/'>Bathsheba Grossman</a>. She<br />
visualizes and then realizes beautiful ideas from mathematics,<br />
cosmology, and organic chemistry.  Contemplate her <a href='http://www.bathsheba.com/crystalsci/largescale/'>Large Scale<br />
Model</a>, an image of the galactic clusters in the three hundred<br />
million cubic light years around Earth &mdash; an eidolon of a<br />
substantial fraction of the observable universe laser-etched into a<br />
three-inch-tall glass block.</p>
<p>It isn&#8217;t quite &#8220;to see the Universe in a grain of sand&#8221;, but nobody<br />
with more sensitivity than a brick could fail to have dizzying and<br />
wonderful vistas of time/space and paradoxical thoughts about scale in<br />
the presence of this luminously beautiful work of art.  All too many<br />
artists portentiously claim that what art is supposed to do is induce<br />
one to meditate on one&#8217;s place in the universe, then deliver pettiness<br />
(or perhaps a toxic political screed) as the punchline.<br />
Ms. Grossman&#8217;s Large Scale Model is the real deal, and a hard slap in<br />
their faces.</p>
<p>Or contemplate Ms. Grossman&#8217;s gorgeous metal sculptures, derived<br />
from mathematical forms by a process that combines hand-modelling with<br />
CAD and produced with cutting-edge 3D-printing technology.  It&#8217;s not<br />
just the end results that are beautiful but the whole dialogue between<br />
art and technology implicit in her<br />
<a href='http://www.bathsheba.com/sculpture/process/'>technique</a>.<br />
After reading about it, I am not surprised to learn that she sometimes<br />
writes her own modeling software &mdash; and, having seen her art, I<br />
would lay a healthy bet that she writes damn <em>good</em> software.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s something refreshing even about Ms. Grossman&#8217;s most narrowly<br />
commercial work.  She will laser-etch the protein structure of your<br />
choice into glass, using the same technique as in the Large Scale<br />
Model, for prices starting at $145.  These images of cloudy, intricate<br />
structure are visually beautiful enough as abstracts, but they derive<br />
their true power from being <em>about something</em>.  About<br />
hemoglobin, the molecule in your blood that carries oxygen.  Or about<br />
the DNA polymerase crucial in cell replication, or the<br />
neurotransmitter acetylcholinesterase.  Each one is a joyful<br />
celebration of our ability to know, to find beauty and meaning in the<br />
complexity of the natural universe.</p>
<p>To see these craft objects, unashamedly made for money (that&#8217;ll be<br />
$40 extra for molecular-surface etching, thank you), is to have your<br />
nose rubbed in the desperate poverty of most modern art, to be<br />
reminded of the vacuum at its core and the pathetic Luke Helders that<br />
the vacuum spawns.  It&#8217;s a poverty of meaning, a parochialism that<br />
insists that the only interesting things in the universe are the<br />
artist&#8217;s own psychological and political quirks.</p>
<p>Bathsheba Grossman&#8217;s art reminds us that exploration of the narrow<br />
confines of an artist&#8217;s head is a poor substitute for artistic<br />
exploration of the universe.  It reminds us that what the artist owes<br />
his audience is beauty and discovery and a sense of connection, not<br />
alienation and ugliness and neurosis and political ax-grinding.</p>
<p>Forgetting this value rotted the core out of the fine arts and<br />
literary fiction of the 20th century. We can hope, though, that<br />
artists like her and Arthur Ganson will show the way forward to<br />
remembering it.  Only in that way will the unhealthy chasm between<br />
popular and fine art be healed, and fine art be restored to a healthy<br />
and organic relationship with culture as a whole.</p>
