I met Semir Zeki to talk about neuroesthetics on a rainy Tuesday of March 2019, in his office at the University College London. As I was getting ready for the interview, I wondered what the working environment of a neuroestheticist looked like. Semir Zeki set the tone when he emailed me: "This is a secure area and the best is to go to the Anatomy Entrance (NOT the Darwin Building entrance)." That said it all! Neuroesthetics was about science and anatomy. Therefore, on my way there, I made sure to put my neurology hat on, and braced myself for a potentially dry discussion about how tiny gray matter areas in the frontal lobe process our perception of visual beauty. I was both relieved and delighted when the discussion took another turn, rapidly bridging out to Renaissance paintings, Mondrian or Agnes Martin, and how these art topics interface with neurobiology.

Semir Zeki defined the term neuroesthetics over two decades ago. He shared his approach in his book, "Inner Vision, an Exploration of Art and the Brain", published in 1999. In 2001, he summarized his conception of neuroesthetics: "Visual art obeys the laws of the visual brain, and thus reveals these laws to us" (Artistic creativity and the brain, Science 2001). I asked him how he defines neuroesthetics today, what his interactions with the art world are, and which future directions he envisions in the field. 
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Semir Zeki insisted that his work is primarily focused on the brain, more precisely on how the brain functions in "the common man" (as opposed to the artist's brain). He also confirmed that his scientific research, which remains question driven, is often derived from observations originally made by art historians or philosophers. "We aim at understanding the brain mechanisms underlying the perception of beauty, rather than asking what beauty is." he told me.

It was a pleasure and a real honor to discuss with Semir Zeki, father of contemporary neuroesthetics, and a true "Renaissance Man", in the most noble and inspiring way.

​These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

How do you define neuroesthetics?
 
Neuroesthetics is a field designed to study the brain. For example: what are the brain systems engaged when you create a work of art, when you experience a work of art, when you experience beauty, or when you experience other emotions that are linked to beauty, such as love or desire?

By opposition, neuroesthetics does not address topics like beauty the way philosophers do. This notion is very important to me, even though there are a lot of art historians and philosophers specialized in esthetics who are resistant to my approach. 

Can you talk more about your neuroesthetic approach of beauty?
 
I believe that the fields of beauty, love and desire, are all linked. This morning I went to the exhibition "The Renaissance Nude", at the Royal Academy of Art in London (Figures 1 and 2). These beautiful paintings were all about desire, sexuality and love, combined. 

​​I am aware that philosophers and art historians have been debating these questions for a long time. I don't dismiss their work. I say they have something to contribute to us. Let's use what they have to contribute.
For example, I share with them an interest in beauty. My approach is to study the brain mechanisms that are engaged when you experience beauty. From a neuroesthetic standpoint, however, the topic is not only about beauty itself, it is larger than that. For example, the brain mechanisms engaged when you experience beauty are related to the ones engaged when you perceive color, faces, or movement. It is the same question.
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For that reason, I think that art is not necessarily equal to beauty. A lot of artists started distinguishing art from beauty after Marcel Duchamp's Urinal [Fountain, sculpture, by Marcel Duchamp (1917) is considered one of the most influential artwork of the 20th century, at the origin of conceptual art. Duchamp aimed at "de-deifying" the artist] (Figure 3). Some philosophers, however, would argue that one can't distinguish art from beauty.

​The question of beauty is related to the question of judgement: I think you can distinguish esthetic judgement from perceptual judgement. In esthetic judgement, you may ask: which shape is the most beautiful? While in perceptual judgement, the question could be: which shape is the largest? My question is: do these two types of judgements follow the same, or different pathways?

Please note that most of the questions I am interested in, arise from the thought of philosophers in esthetics: what are the distinct brain mechanisms involved when you experience something you find sublime, versus something you find "just beautiful"? What are the brain mechanisms involved when you make a decision with regard to beauty or desire? This shows you that the scope of the field is very wide. It is not limited to just studying beauty. It includes everything that is allied to beauty.
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​Can you tell us about the creation of the field of neuroesthetics?
 
Neuroesthetics embodies the notion of interdisciplinarity. The field arose organically from the 1980s onwards. I created the term "Neuroesthetics" in December of 1995. I was giving The Woodhull Lecture at the Royal Institution in London. I talked about specialized functions of the brain (color vision, form vision, motion vision), and about brain and beauty in art. This is how the term was created (see "Inner Vision, an Exploration of Art and the Brain").
 
How big is the neuroesthetics community?
 
There are two categories of people specialized in neuroesthetics. The ones that are officially "out of the closet", who say they work in the field. And the ones who contribute to neuroesthetics without calling themselves "neuroestheticists". For example, researchers studying decision making, or sexual desire, contribute to the field of neuroesthetics, even though that was not their original intention. The field of neuroesthetics is continuously expanding.
 
The art scene and the history of art are very different in the UK compared with America. How do you think this influences your work?
 
Art may be more sophisticated here in the UK, but America is more hospitable to new ideas.  So in a way, I would love to combine the two. I have a fond memory of the International Neuroesthetics Conference held by the Minerva Foundation in Berkeley, that I co-created with my friend Elvin Marg. I am sorry that this project is on hold.

Do you often derive your research questions from artists?
 
Yes, I have plenty of examples.

The English art critique Clive Bell (Figure 4) suggested that certain visual elements trigger our experience of beauty, and we all share this [In his book Art  (1914), Bell [1881-1964] claims that certain forms, lines and colors trigger esthetic emotions that are common across cultures and unrelated to object identity. He was therefore a defender of abstract art.]

From Bell's philosophy, we derived our neuroesthetic study about the common brain pathways engaged when we experience something as beautiful (Figure 5, , see this article). We extended our analysis to both visual and musical stimuli. The perception of visual or musical beauty starts with specific sensory inputs [visual or auditory], but shares a common pathway associated with the feeling of beauty itself, located in the medial orbito frontal cortex.
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We later extended our analysis even further, to another kind of beauty: the beauty of mathematics. This was based in the evocation of mathematical beauty by Bertrand Russel and Herman Weyl. [Russel [1872-1970] was a British mathematician, philosopher and Nobel laureate. In The Study of Mathematics, published in 1919, he wrote: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture". Weyl [1885-1955] was an influential German mathematician and philosopher. He viewed the field of mathematics as an organic whole rather than a series of individual subjects. He said : “My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”] In this study, we found that the brain mechanisms underlying the appreciation of mathematical beauty are similar to the ones involved when visual stimuli are perceived as beautiful [The study shows that the experience of mathematical beauty, like the experience of musical or visual beauty, correlates with a similar activity the medial orbito frontal cortex of the brain]. This paper about mathematical beauty ended up being of huge general interest since, as of today, its online version has been viewed over 160,000 times! Interestingly, despite the eventual general interest, the manuscript was rejected a few times by other journals before its final publication. 

​Do you think this is because editors were unsure how to categorize it?
 
Well, this is exactly the problem. Still, the publication of this paper allowed some closeted mathematicians to talk more openly about the beauty of mathematics. Beauty is a very important component of mathematics.
 
Do you have other examples of questions derived from the field of art or philosophy?
 
Another example of a question derived from philosophers is the question of the brain mechanisms engaged in the appreciation of beauty versus the sublime: this study was derived from the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer about the notion of sublime versus beauty. [The sublime may be described as the quality of ultimate greatness (Figure 6). Edmund Burke [1729-1787] was an Irish statesman and philosopher. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Burke says that sublimity and beauty are mutually exclusive, both able to trigger pleasure, even though sublimity may be associated with horror. Kant [1724-1804] was a German philosopher. In Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant writes that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", and relates to "Understanding", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness", and belongs to "Reason". Schopenhauer [1788-1860] was a German philosopher. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), he proposes a gradient of transition from the "Feeling of Beauty" (pleasure from the mere perception of an object) to the "Fullest Feeling of Sublime" (pleasure from knowledge of the observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).]

Our neuroesthetic analysis confirmed that, indeed, the perception of sublimity is associated with a brain activation pattern distinct from the one associated with the perception of beauty (Figure 5).

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You are saying that opposite emotions may be associated with a common brain pathway (in this case the one involved in the perception of beauty). On the other hand, we know that some emotional manifestations that seem identical may engage distinct brain mechanisms. For example, uncontrollable laughter can be triggered by the stimulation of a specific part of the subthalamic area in cases of deep brain stimulation, or by activation of totally distinct temporal, frontal or hypothalamic areas in gelastic epileptic seizures.
 
Yes. Similarly, visual stimuli associated with beauty can be diverse. Philosophers of esthetics, and art critics have asked for a long time what is common to all the things we experience as beautiful. Clive Bell wondered what were the commonalities between the windows of the Chartres cathedral [1220], a masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin [1594-1665] or Piero della Francesca [1416-1492]. But he never gave an answer.
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Neuroesthetics can give an answer, and it is a neurobiological answer: ultimately, everything that you experience as beautiful [but not sublime] correlates with activity in the medial orbito frontal cortex (Figure 5). The correlation has been demonstrated. What remains to be demonstrated, though, is how you get there. This is a good example for the future directions in neuroesthetics.
 
What do you want to tell art critics, art historians or philosophers that you perceive as "neurophobic"?
 
The group of neurophobics is a small group, but it has been remarkably vocal. I would reciprocate by telling them: "you may hate us, but we love you!" As a neuroestheticist, I am inspired by questions asked by art historians, or art critics. I am also extremely interested in artists and the interest has been reciprocal. I regularly discuss at length with artists about topics of common interest. I learn a lot from collaborating with artists and art institutions (schools, museums).
 
You described the term "neurophobia". I am curious to know if you ever observed the reverse phenomenon, that I would call "artphobia", among scientists?
 
Not at all! The scientific community I know has been very hospitable to neuroesthetics. For scientists, the question is what is important. I have always had a lot of support from the scientific community to address scientific questions related to neuroesthetics.
 
Do you have artists in your lab?
 
Absolutely! I have students from the arts faculty, and a PhD student studying philosophy.

We are really very open, as long as one understands that my laboratory is a scientific one.  All collaborations are welcome, as long as they help us understand the brain: we aim at understanding the brain mechanisms underlying the perception of beauty, rather than asking what beauty is.
 
What would you expect from an ideal neuroesthetics conference?
 
My current topics of interest are questions related to desire, beauty and love. I would invite presenters with various backgrounds, as long as their knowledge contribute to answering these questions. For example, in 2015, I organized a meeting called "The Science of Beauty" at the Royal Society in Edinburgh. Sir Roger Penrose gave a beautiful talk on the role of Art in Mathematics and Sir David Attenborough spoke about the sense of beauty in pufferfish (see BBC documentary). Did you know that these pufferfish create fantastic visual patterns in the sand on the sea floor to attract females? They create these patterns in a carefully balanced way, coordinated with the tide. We debated about what appears to these animals to be a desirable experience, and the fact that, still, we aren't able to comment about their perception of beauty.

​Talking about lines, Agnes Martin, who spent years painting horizontal and vertical lines only, felt that they were the essence of beauty: "Take beauty: it's a very mysterious thing, isn't it? (...) My paintings are (...) just horizontal lines. There's not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think." (interview by Joan Simon, in Taos, 1995). As if these lines, whether they satisfied the over-representation of the corresponding orientation selective cells, or they were related to some kind of geometric perfection, activated the same common pathway associated with beauty as perceived from visual stimuli or mathematics. What does this inspire you?
 
It seems that Mondrian perceived vertical and horizontal lines as pure beauty, in a way similar to Agnes Martin's (Figure 8B).
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That being said, we are now talking about the perception of beauty through the eyes of painters. I would like to emphasize again that neuroesthetics is not interested in the artist, composer, or painter; it is not interested in the art historian. Neuroesthetics is interested in "the common man". Neuroesthetics assumes that all humans have the capacity to experience beauty, but what each one experiences as beautiful is different [beauty is subjective]. We are so much interested in the common mechanisms of the perception of beauty, that, in our studies, we exclude painters, artists and "knowledgeable people". This idea also comes from Clive Bell: he said that if you want to know about esthetic emotion, don't ask an artist for he knows too much! Ask the "savages", the infants! 

I would like to switch to the topic of future directions in neuroesthetics. Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), Dutch early pioneer in computing science, once said: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”. Would you like to comment on this, and, in general, on the question of whether a computer can produce or appreciate art?
 
I go along with this quote! I think a computer may be able to produce art, I don t think it can appreciate art. However, I am very hesitant to talk about computers in general. I am very suspicious of these deep learning programs, artificial intelligence etc... They can certainly do a lot of things but I am not sure they can appreciate beauty; and if they do, what I know is: this won't happen in my life time! And there is something that will always be challenging to model: "the soul".

[In itallic]: notes and references added by me

Pablo Picasso once said: "Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen." On March 5, 2019, I attended a debate at the Royal Drawing School in London, about the late work of the blind British painter Sargy Mann (1937-2015) (Figure 1). Blind painters such as Sargy Mann teach us about perception. The debate reminded me that perception connects all our senses -including the visual, that there are multiple ways to perceive visually and therefore, multiple ways to produce and appreciate visual art.
 

Sargy Mann developed cataracts from the age of 35. At the age of 42, he got retinal detachment, in one, then both eyes, causing progressive degradation of vision. He eventually lost his sight in 2005, acutely, by his 68th birthday. He continued to paint for 10 years until his death.
As a painter, Sargy observed some changes in the process of losing his vision, that pertained to subject matter, color, details and authenticity (Figures 2A and 2B). Originally a landscape painter, as he became blind, figures became increasingly important. He explained: "Because I couldn't see people anymore it became more important to paint them." His wife Frances became his favorite model: " I suppose you always paint the things you most want to see." He carefully documented the other changes he observed in his writings (Perceptual systems, an inexhaustible reservoir of information and the importance of art). For example, he noticed that he "started using color in a much more intuitive and decorative way." He also noted that "the extraordinary paradox is that going blind has taught (him) to see more and differently". Finally, he talked about how blindness led him to more authenticity: "When I started going seriously blind that option of going out and finding Monet’s subject wasn’t there, and because I was so thrown back on my own limitations, curiously, I think this led me into a much more personal world, a world that was more my experience and my way of responding to it."

As Sargy, John eventually found a way to paint his inner vision of the world (Figures 6A and 6B). "Art has opened up the world to me, in a whole new way (...) Painting is the way I know the world today, it's my connection to it. (...) I wanted to tell people that I was still in here, hey I am still here!" As Sargy, he noticed that his way of seeing or drawing the world evolved as he became blind, in his case in a more detailed and emotional way. His perception became more detailed: "I see less, but when I do see I see with a lot more details". He also finds himself more able to perceive and convey people's emotions on the canvas: "Many of the most interesting parts of a person are invisible and hidden from view anyway; I think my blindness might be just the lens that is needed to see into that world."

​Visual harmony is a very real thing for Polish artist ​Iwo Zaniewski. It is not a hallucination, or a mystical concept. It is an assertive, experienced appreciation of beauty. It relates to the visual equilibrium reached by the juxtaposition of visual elements in relation to each other (ex: shapes and colors), that eventually make a beautiful painting. Per Iwo, "each change causes a deterioration of the visual assessment of the whole".

He consulted the theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics), specialized in elemental particules and gravity, to review the coherence of his theory on visual "equal dispersion" of elements.

He collaborated with Piotr Francuz, Head of the Department of Experimental Psychology and Director of the Institute of Psychology (Faculty of Social Sciences, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin). Using an eye-tracking technique, they compared how other like-minded brains recognized harmony in painting they picked in the world repertoire, versus the same paintings Iwo altered using photoshop.

Iwo was also asked by American computer scientists for help in creating a software that would capture his way of determining harmony in a painting- the task appeared too daunting in the end.

Recently, he reached out to Stepan Ivanyk, Polish philosopher specialized in esthetics (Warsaw University). They are now writing an article about harmony in the context of the history of esthetics.

Finally, Iwo tried to establish parallels between harmony as observed in paintings versus in real world. Last, he reached out to me, to determine how neuroesthetics overlaps with his theory of visual harmony.

What I find most interesting when talking with Iwo, is his conviction, based on personal experience, that harmony does exist as an entity bigger than himself, and his obsessive quest to figure out what it is. His question is based on his experience as an artist. But he expands his search beyond the world of art, to science and the humanities.

I am also fascinated by how hard he tries to figure out how to reach the state of visual harmony during the creative process. He explained to me how, when he starts a project, his creative brain comes up with visual ideas, as a succession of dazzling, flashing images that end up, with time, coming together and forming a cohesive and effective object of art. He is always puzzled by where these images come from and how the final project takes shape. This applies to his painting, but also to his work as writer and director of over 2000 commercials he has produced over the past 26 years.

To me, these questions are grounded in neuroesthetics, even though Iwo sees them as a personal quest. Creativity, as harmony, or beauty, indeed exists as an entity bigger than ourselves. But, as Agnes Martin said it, "the beauty is in the mind, not in the flower." Harmony must be engraved somewhere in our brain, as one of the ultimate results of complex visual brain processes. It must be stored in some flexible, both personal and universal manner. It must be linked to a subtle and hard to describe equilibrium in our brain, somewhere at the interface between perception, cognition, memory and emotion processing. Only visible by ourselves. Hidden from analysis. Extremely hard to model. Harmony is not encoded in magics. It is, indeed, a real thing. One engraved in Iwo's brain, in mine, and in many other artists' or art lovers'.
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I can't wait to collaborate with Iwo. His approach really represents what I miss from my home continent: raising more questions than giving answers, persisting, using both our perception and our brain, crossing discipline boundaries, and incorporating the history of knowledge in the history of painting.
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I can't wait to join Iwo in his Search for the real, as Hans Hofmann called it.
In the meantime, I encourage you to take some time to reflect on why composition matters in the process of creating harmony, to understand what Iwo means with his "universal mathematical formula", and to experience harmony yourself in Iwo's videos. If you take the time, you will see that the artist Iwo has a lot to share about visual art... and about neuroesthetics.
 
 (Hans Hofman was a German-born American painter and considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism; I highly recommend his essays)

07/19/2018
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I discussed the art of aestetic judgments with Andrew Herman.

Listen to episode 44.
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State of the Art is a podcast looking at technology's role in the art world, because tech is bringing radical change in the way all of us interact with art.

May 3, 2018

I debated about how artificial intelligence and art intertwine with Josette Melchor, Gray Area Founder (San Francisco), Alicia Sabuncuoglu, Strategic Partner Development Manager for Social Impact at Google, and Juliette Bibasse, digital art curator and producer at the Academy of Science in San Francisco.

You can read about the event in this article by Anna Volpicelli.
 

I agree with Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), Dutch early pioneer in computing science, when he said: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” Submarines look like they are swimming (they move forward, up and down) but they actually don't swim like fish. I like the analogy: computers can create and analyze visual data, like the submarine can move in water. Is this authentic art? At the same time, technology like google art palette can be an extension of the artist, a new medium, or a new tool, enhancing his/her artistic power.

Another question that remains open is: who can legitimize art? Pierre Bourdieu approached the question with a sociological eye (The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996)): he categorized the legitimacy of various types of art production depending on who defines it, from academia to "non legitimate" authorities such as advertising (see picture below).

Finally, Artists and Robots, the exhibition that took place in Paris at the Grand Palais April 5-July 9, 2018, was an ideal opportunity to reflect on whether robots can make art... or not. I hope the exhibition will be brought to San Francisco soon.

To see my slides, click here
Sorry, I don't have a video.

Navigating the spectrum between abstraction and representation is challenging. Semi-abstract paintings often feel nice, but also botched, incomplete, or irrelevant (see the zebra picture at the bottom of this post); but not the ones by my favorite painter Nicolas De Staël. Here is what I learned from De Staël's biography by Laurent Greilsamer (2003): making relevant semi-abstract paintings requires 3 artistic qualities: authenticity, idealism and ambition. De Staël’s artistic quest genuinely went beyond the classification of abstraction versus representation. Semi-abstraction happened without him categorizing it as such.
 
The authenticity of De Staël is palpable throughout his writings and his life. He was in remote contact with contemporary artists who were leaders in abstraction (ex: Kandinsky, Picasso) and criticized the very notion of categorizing abstraction versus figuration (see here). Originally influenced by Alberto Magnelli, pioneer in abstraction who went himself back and forth between figuration and abstraction, De Staël explored abstraction and then refused to aim specifically for it, exasperating his peers by his resistance to fully embrace the movement, and growing isolated: “You are stopping halfway, harshly reproached Jean Dewasne, who was resolutely turning towards geometrical abstraction” (p237). De Staël persisted his idealistic quest towards the “truth’, dedicating his entire self to it, neglecting his comfort and the one of his family “He is starving, and his family along him, but covers his canvas with the most sumptuous pastes” writes Greilsamer (P199).  De Staël’s ambition for himself included high expectations for the art of painting in general. When Jean Dewasme, offended by the resistance of De Staël to embrace the notion of abstraction, asked him: ”One need to move forward, steam ahead, invent, invent everything, find new forms, not repeat the past!” De Staël answered: “What do you think I am doing? What matters is the painting, only the painting, the tension that happens there, between inorganic order and organic disorder! Voilà! One need to struggle with the canvas, make it go off!" (p237). As Greilsamer put it: “Staël followed deep reasons that were related to his pride, his confidence of being unique, his refusal of schools of thought. He preferred being the only contemporary artist in a “small” gallery, over being a pawn in a prestigious racing stable”. I think these were the driving forces that made De Staël mastering semi-abstract art, without naming it. The paintings below are the living proof of his mastery, in the 3 main genres of paintings.

Some painters, as Salvador Dali, trick us. When we look at Dali's paintings (see picture below), we think we are looking at visual arts, while in fact, we are spying on Dali's mental world, highly loaded with thoughts and verbal concepts, not with visual concepts. 
Salvador Dali used the visual language, not for the sake of it, but to illustrate his psyche, his favorite subject matter. When I visited the Dali exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2013, I could see how people were hooked as they accessed Dali's very unusual mind through his numerous art pieces. They were fascinated by Dali's exceptional mental giftedness, his overflowing delusional paranoia, and the fair amount of death and pornography included in his work. I was myself almost under the spell. 

Dali is undeniably an amazing painter, at least technically. In fact, his technical virtuosity is so overwhelming that, at first sight, one may think it is what his paintings are about. The technical qualities of his paintings (smooth finish, pseudo realistic rendering) and the unusual subject matter (projection of the mind, melting watches, organic forms of unclear origin, surrealistic world) are what makes us believe that this is great visual art. But it is masking the reality, which is that Dali’s paintings are actually about the verbal concept of “paranoiac knowledge”, as he called it, or "the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked", and not about the painting itself.  Dali described his work as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena." His subject matter is his psyche. His process is based on psychological introspection. One could almost say Dali paints from imagination (as opposed to nature). The painting is just a support to deliver his concepts. 

For example, in The persistence of Memory (see picture below, on the left), the notion of hard versus soft, the symbol of the time that passes, and the oniric or delusional imagery refer to verbal concepts issued from Dali's mind. The soft central piece may even be seen as a symbolic representation of the artist's tortured mind, half sleeping or delusional. In that sense, Dali's painting virtuosity takes us where he wants us to go, which is inside his complex mind. For that reason, one could consider him a brilliant, efficient painter.

However, I would argue with that. The fascination comes primarily from the character of Dali himself (and therefore his subject matter), more than from the painting qualities per se. In a way,  I wish Dali used his technical talents to make amazing paintings, meaningful in a plastic way, instead of limiting himself to illustrations of his mind. In his smartness, and untreated madness, Dali was in fact very aware of that: in a famous interview, he claimed he was a very bad painter and attempted to explain why (see video below). 

Coming from a person with an oversized ego, this statement meant a lot. In the video, Dali was paradoxically humble (or realistic) about his work as a painter, and confessed he was mostly interested in the mind (being intelligent), while he felt paint should be restricted to dummies. This is where he really missed the point. Great art work as by Velasquez (that he quotes, see picture above on the right) are not necessarily made by dummies. In fact there are innumerable examples of great artists with a brain at least as gifted as Dali, but probably more psychologically balanced.

As a brain specialist, I don't grow tired of watching Dali's interviews and paintings: what an amazing window into the brain of a true paranoiac (or a person faking it very well), who fully embraced his delusions and made something remarkable out of it! Unfortunately, I think Dali teaches us more about paranoia than about painting. He had a great painting potential, but did not develop it. In a way he wasted his talent as a painter, because he was so focused on putting it at the service of illustrating his delusions.