I was listening to the radio yesterday when they mentioned the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I was amazed to learn the researchers had gained some insight in to how we navigate the world around us. The whole concept seems too ineffable to be grasped. But indeed the researchers gained at least a toehold on it.
What really got me was that this development was based on a discovery one of the researchers made in 1971 and then bolstered by a discovery the other two award recipients made in 2005.
Now I am sure each has experienced many other developments in their research and that these discoveries informed other areas of research. But it left me pondering at the patience and belief involved in scientific research to wait over 30 years for some other piece of research that complements and validates your own. Then wait nearly a decade more for people to vet both pieces of research and recognize the significance.
Again I am not saying this is the only thing the researchers have accomplished in their careers and that they only received validation when they were awarded the Noble Prize.
I just feel somewhat humbled by the idea that research is being done with the faith that it may contribute to a profound discovery.
Scientists and artists pursue their vocations differently so it isn’t fair to try to compare the two directly. Still, how many of us in the arts, practitioners and funders alike, are instilled with a vision of what we want to accomplish that spans decades and have the patience to see it through?
Certainly the arts operate much more reactively than science as times and tastes change.
When you are worried about next year’s funding, it can be difficult to cleave to a long term vision of where you want to be.
I am not sure if scientists have a grand master vision either rather than focusing on progressing from one project to the next. My perception is that there is a greater acknowledgment that progress takes time and there is a greater willingness to accord them that time.
On the other hand, artists can be sustained by a similar thought that a performance given today may plant seeds that manifest into something of international note decades down the road.
An interesting entry, but I’m left with several ‘why’ questions…
I’m not certain why you would consider a ‘grand master vision’ as having a relationship to the arts at all. We composers don’t have singular problems to solve. We certainly use the word ‘experiment’ in a different way from science. Nor are our compositions necessarily linear, even if after-the-fact analysis reveals some common threads. Indeed, much art and music sets out to confront the present in such a way as to proceed at an angle from it. I do not believe that we proceed ‘reactively’ — we proceed creatively and inventively, very different behaviors.
Having a vision is also different from having patience. In January I’ll pass the 50-year mark as a composer, and I’ve had the patience to focus on it through all those years and through nearly 1,100 compositions. My ‘vision’ was to continue to experiment and invent and reveal some new facet of sonic life at each point.
When you say ‘progress takes time’ you’re also investing in the 1930s attitude toward the arts … the they ‘progress’. I believe that notion has long dissolved.
Did you have an unfinished point here?
Dennis-
Well I think that it is possible for arts organizations and artists to have a grand master vision that they want to accomplish, but that can get bogged down in the demands of every day life.
An arts organization might want to occupy a certain position in the their community or build capacity to provide a certain program.
I have a composer friend who was talking to me the other day about his ambition to return to projects he had started in grad school around 20 years ago as well as current interests he has. In a way I saw that as an example of both ambition thwarted and building on work of the past similar to how the Noble was based on work from 1971. Though he doesn’t know if he will have the opportunity to revisit his past work.
As you point out, it isn’t necessary to have a grand vision in order to be productive. My entry was sort of an open ended musing on operating in an environment where there was some degree of faith that while the value of what you produced today might not immediately be apparent, it might prove worthwhile down the road.
When I spoke about proceeding reactively, I was referring to the fact that the arts react to the times and taste rather than lead. While it is true that some works have initially have not been to popular taste, they were in reaction to something that preceded them.
In terms of progress taking time, I am not sure that really is a 1930s view of the arts. Things do not spring whole cloth from people’s heads. The view that it does can be problematic.
One example is the “sophomore” slump experienced by many musical groups. Everyone is amazed when a band comes out of nowhere with an album where every song makes them swoon. But then the second album is a disappointment.
The fact is, that band probably didn’t come out of nowhere. They may have spent years working together, testing and refining their music until they had enough high quality content to create a solid album.
The next album they only had a year to work on and it doesn’t have the appeal of the first. Everyone is disappointed and discounts them as a one hit/album wonder.
Perhaps if the group hadn’t been expected to produce something else so quickly, they could have done a better job of matching the quality of their first effort.
Though there are many possible variables and scenarios when it comes to different arts disciplines, this is the sort of thing I am thinking of when I say progress takes time.
Thanks, Joe.
George Dyson’s “The Progress of Music” is what that phrase always triggers in me. Written during the age of streamlining (published in 1932), it’s what I find is not happening anymore — the idea that there’s any kind of linearity, any kind of progress. Sure, art might link to the recent past (some art, anyway), but in the postmodern (and beyond) time, that progress has vanished.
I think your example of the (perhaps) regretful, backward-looking composer reveals that linearity can be broken even within a single individual.
As for the lead/react idea, Shlain’s “Art and Physics” (1993) suggests that both fields actually do lead rather than react. Unlike your suggestion that art reacts to time/taste, arts create time/taste and then taste swings round to claim reward for its investment. (That’s when the butts leave the seats.)
Of course, if you’re indeed talking about butts in the seats — and I’ve been reading you silently for a long time — then the art and music you’ll have will of course be reactive, and the choices made will involve the well-known or less inventive. But that’s not where the creative moment is happening, the Shlain moment; it precedes that reactive stage, itself producing the pre-sophomore-slump art, to use your image (though it applies less to individual artists than bands, I’d guess).
Altogether an interesting idea, but a little too marketplace-driven from my point of view!
Dennis- Ah, you toss out a lot to consider and read up on. I would especially be interested in reading Art and Physics because my impression has always been that art was always reacting to something. One thing that popped to mind when I was writing my earlier response was Surrealism and Dada being a reaction to the first world war even though it was not initially being critically or popularly well received.
I will accept criticism that my argument might not have been well fleshed out. I intentionally only marked it with the general musings category for that reason. Responses like yours are what I hope for when I write. After all, how do I know the value of my own progress if my statements remain unchallenged?