Dorothée Chabas
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Was Salvador Dali a bad painter?

10/16/2014

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PictureDali’s Mustache, photo by Philip Halsman, 1954
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.

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The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali, 1931
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Old Woman Frying Eggs, by Diego Velazquez, 1618
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.
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Effect of tomatoes on the soprano: the hilarious neuroesthetic article of Georges Perec makes me wonder about creativity in science today

10/6/2014

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PictureGeorges Perec
In 1974, Georges Perec, the French novelist of the Oulipo Group, wrote a hilarious pastiche of a scientific article about music: Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.). This parody is doubly relevant to neuroesthetics: its subject matter is a neuroesthetic study (how does throwing a tomato at a soprano affect her singing!), and the text itself is a masterpiece of language experimentation (pseudo-scientific article) by a virtuosic writer who was exposed to scientific literature when he was a librarian.

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Cantatrix Sopranica L., by Georges Perec
The comic effect in Cantatrix sopranica L. comes from the paradoxical distancing of the author (serious tone) from his and our emotions (laughter), and the use of abstruse vocabulary and syntax contrasting with the so-called straightforward scientific demonstration that they are meant to convey. At the same time, those who, like me, published or tried to publish articles in scientific journals, will recognize the mindset we are in when it comes to (re-re-re-)write and (re-re-re-)format a manuscript for submission, in a desperate attempt to fit in and please the reviewers. The language used in scientific articles has always puzzled me. At the same time, when I am in a good mood, I find the autonomous flow of technical words, the regular recurrence of specific terms of unclear significance that become more and more familiar throughout the text, the rhythm chopped up by references, and the unreadable figures supported by overloaded legends, almost endearing, if not poetic. Cristina Grasseni reported an unexpected appreciation of beauty through "skilled vision"; why not acknowledging that "skilled scientific writing" may also carry an inherent aesthetic value?
Yet I find the format of scientific writing very limiting in terms of creativity. In 2012, Phillip Prager, who spoke at the 11th International Conference on Neuroesthetics,  suggested in his article "Making an Art of Creativity: The Cognitive Science of Duchamp and Dada" (Creativity Research Journal), that scientists are less resistant than artists to the idea of creativity as a "combinatorial process" that can be the result of chance: "seemingly incompatible concepts are blended into surprising new meanings, ‘‘a cut and paste process’’ in which ‘‘two concepts or complex mental structures are somehow combined to produce a new structure, with its own new unity (...) or ‘‘conceptual combination’’". Prager refers to scientific discoveries that date mostly from last Century (ex: unexpected discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928). I wonder if "chance" is still embraced today as a factor of creativity in scientific research, especially in academia? Where is the space for creativity, chance and combinatorial process in scientific articles? 

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Creativity research Journal
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Phillip Prager
Similarly, this question applies to scientific grant applications: guidelines suggest that they be strongly "hypothesis driven", with a clearly defined "aim", and preliminary data (supporting the hypothesis) are a pre-requisite. More specifically, the NIH recommends, when it comes to designing a project for RO1 grants (classic research grants for principal autonomous investigators): "Be innovative, but be wary" or "Since innovation is a review criterion, you want to think outside of the box—but not too far". According to the NIH, innovation is a slight expansion of the "known" towards the "unknown" (see picture below). There is no space for chance, and barely for risk.
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Representation of an innovating project by the NIH (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/researchfunding/grant/strategy/pages/2designproj.aspx#k1)
So I am wondering and hoping: could neuroesthetic research (and emerging literature) be innovative and free itself from the sole constraints of academic standards? Could the emerging neuroesthetic literature be more open to chance? Wouldn't it foster creativity in the field? I hope so, but there may be a long way to go: Phillip Prager told me he was not able to publish his paper in an "art history" journal, while a more "scientific journal" accepted it right away. Still, when I read his article, I did not find it really... scientific (nor do I think that Creativity Research Journal can be considered a pure scientific journal)! Regardless, I found his article absolutely fascinating and relevant to both science and the history of art.
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    Dorothee Chabas is a painter and neurologist

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