When people ask me why I wanted to work in a museum, I usually describe the "aha! moment" I had when I saw that first Michelangelo in Oxford. It's not the best phrase, maybe, but it does the work I want it to: it describes in humble language (I didn't want to describe it as an "epiphany," for example) a single instant of getting it. Like when my nephew was born: the 48 hours of labor preceeding the actual birth were excellent birth control, but as soon as his big punkin head popped out, I thought, "Ohhhh. So this is why people have kids." I got it.
It was pointed out to me by various people over the course of last quarter that "aha! moment" might be well, a little hokey. After all, Oprah uses it. And do I really want my readers to be thinking about Oprah? So I've been going back and forth on this issue for several months now. In the thesis draft I just turned in last week, I omitted all references to "aha!" and replaced it instead with the somewhat more loquacious "experience of being pulled into the here-and-now."
My advisor just emailed me yesterday with the breaking news that the front page of the online edition of the New York Times (and the paper version of today's paper!) features an article by chief art critic Michael Kimmelman. Kimmelman was pretty much the reason I went to graduate school–he writes about art reflectively, contemplatively, and in a way that is readable, accessible, and even exciting. He anticipates his readers' doubts and skepticisms and persuades them to give art a chance. Even the difficult kind of art, the earthworks and Yoko Ono performances and Bob Ross and his "happy little clouds." His book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (which you should immediately go out and purchase) has been the model for the kind of writing I'm trying to do.
So of course I went straight to the article. (I've copied it here since the New York Times doesn't archive their articles for more than a week.) Either Kimmelman doesn't watch Oprah or he doesn't care, because he draws on V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist who is interested in the relationship between neurology and the visual arts. Ramachandran describes–you guessed it–an "aha! moment" when the brain processes, say, seemingly disorganized splotches that become a Dalmation upon closer examination.
Ramachandran even goes so far as to compare the experience of understanding art to an orgasm: "[art] may be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax." He describes the climax as the culmination of the multiple "ahas!" that one undergoes when they try to discern that Dalmation. He says that our brains seem to tend toward things like grouping together like colors or assembling parts as a whole.
It would seem, then, that Ramachandran is working from the premise that art is beautiful. But I think that premise was thrown out the window a long time ago, certainly at least by the time Cubism and Futurism were entering the art world's consciousness. Beauty wasn't the point. Subverting beauty was (at least, it was a point). Good art doesn't have to be beautiful; sometimes it's provocative or frightening or just plain challenging. And why shouldn't Yoko Ono or earthworks provide an "aha! moment"?
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current book: Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, vol. 1. That's not gonna change for awhile.
current music: Amelie soundtrack
current socks: white socks with red toes and heels and "Texas" written on the side. There's a Texas flag on the top of the sock, and when you fold it down, it says "The Lone Star State."
Hi Laura!
I’m finally getting around to looking through your cool blog–thanks for keeping me in the loop.
I call the “aha!” moment “perceptual synthesis”; perceptual because it’s almost completely grounded in your own subjectivity and synthesis, because you saw the work of art at the best possible time and in the right space for numerous and random concepts to integrate into coherent (or at least reconciled) thought.
Yay! A comment! Discourse!
I like the concept of “perceptual synthesis” to describe *what’s* happening, but it doesn’t capture the magic of the actual (well… actual as we perceive it) *happening.* It’s really slippery, though, and it becomes more slippery because we describe one thing by describing the other. I definitely agree about the randomness… it’s like this shimmery wobble between space and time where integration happens. Aha!
[...] I’ve been trying all week to write a mini-review of the DaVinci exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, but I’ve been a bit unfocused, so the full review will come later this weekend. The nutshell version is that it was pretty good: a little too kid-focused for my tastes, but generally well-designed and well-executed. (Unable to stop copy editing even on a holiday weekend, I found exactly two errors in the label copy.) My biggest problem was that it lacked real meat, something that would have elicited gasps and oohs and aahs. The closest it came was with two actual sheets from Leonardo’s notebooks, but even these were displayed somewhat casually amidst computer-generated models of the notebooks. When I saw the stellar Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York a few years ago, this moment–can I call it the aha! moment?–was the split second in which I understood the theory of relativity. For those of you who have ever taken a math or science class with me, you will know that this is a VERY BIG DEAL. If you have not had the pleasure of witnessing my scientific and mathematical ineptitude, you should know that I fulfilled my college science requirement with a course known as “Rocks for Jocks” and that I still count on my fingers. [...]