This is something I’ve been turning over in my head for a few weeks. It started a while back after I saw yet another article on left brain/right brain-ness. You would think that this construct would have gone the way of alchemy and a flat Earth by now, but for some reason, I just keep running into it. Like the “we only use 10% of our brains” legend, it’s wrong.

Things that are often confused with left and right brain-ness are symbolism and form. It is often said that the right brain is “artistic” while the left is “logical”, or that when you draw you use the right brain (form) and when you write you use the left (symbol). There is a certain amount of truth to this, which is probably the real reason right/left brain-ness persists despite it being a terrible way to understand cognitive functioning. In reality, the right brain has structures which handle the synthesis of scene and form while the left brain organizes and manipulates symbolic representations of ideas.

The problem I have with classifying someone as right or left brained is that everybody does both of these things all the time, so to say someone is predominantly one or the other is so reductionist as to be meaningless. Most people will have structures from both the right and left brain that they use easily and intuitively, and any given piece can be more or less dominant than its counterpart in the opposite hemisphere.

More to the point: it has been shown that people who favor symbolic logic over synthesis of form can learn to draw faces by turning photographs upside-down. With the typical facial cues obscured, the shapes part of the brain takes over and the faces come out looking more recognizable than if the artist relied on the symbolic part of the brain exclusively. I’ve talked about this before, and it’s a pretty well-understood phenomenon.

But there’s a problem. Turning a photograph upside down doesn’t help anyone to draw. Everyone can draw. It doesn’t even help anyone to draw better. Turning a photograph upside down really only does one thing. It helps people draw more realistically.

If you take a look back through the annals of art history, you may notice that quite a bit of art is symbolic in nature: cave paintings in Lascaux, France; Egyptian temples; Greek kraters; Japanese woodblock prints; Medieval illuminated manuscripts; African tribal patterns; Islamic floral motifs; and many others. These all share that very important aspect. They’re all “flat”, representational symbols on the two dimensional plane.

This becomes even more pronounced when you compare, for example, the illustrations on Greek kraters from the classical era (beginning around the 4th century BC until the Hellenistic period about one hundred years later) to sculpture of the same period. Look at it long enough and the following question begins to surface, “how could Greek sculptors manage anatomically perfect depictions of Zeus throwing a spear while artists decorating those bowls can barely manage to draw a hand half the time?” Why is the sculpture so amazing, while the two dimensional art barely improved from the Egyptians, who were doing their thing some one thousand years earlier?

Greek sculpture is “realistic” because it’s a direct copy from someone in 3D space to another object in 3D space. On the other hand, Greek illustration, like illustration for thousands of years before, and for at least another thousand years after, had to wrestle with flattening three dimensions onto two. The symbolic part of the brain—which was already being used to write on flat surfaces—took over, and all this stuff came out symbolically, rather than “realistically”.

Perspective wouldn’t start to be explored until the 1300’s in Europe, when some guy tried to paint a church, and kinda got it approximately right, sort of, but didn’t do it well enough to be convincing. The honor of discovering the mathematical laws of perspective falls to Phillipo Brunelleschi, who, around 1415, busted out a painting of a baptistery in a church that was so dead on, people looking through a key hole couldn’t tell if what they saw was the real deal, or the painting.

For a few centuries, the only way to get persistent realism was painting. Artists experimented with media, light, color, and style, but basically stayed within the realm of the perspectively-correct and concrete. Modern art, then, is said to have come about after we discovered a way to let anyone make a perspectively-correct and concrete image at the touch of a button. With the invention of the camera, it was no longer the job of the artist to create a convincing and persistent scene.

And look what happened—art immediately reverted to symbolism. Not even one hundred years after Mr. Daguerre refined the wet-plate process, art was knee-deep in symbolic abstraction.

What makes modern art so interesting and unique, however, is that while it is symbolic, it did not (for the most part) go back along the path of its predecessors. Most of this pre-perspective symbolic art shares another trait: it was used to tell a story. Illiterate people could learn the values and history of their culture by “reading” the iconic pictures drawn by other people. Modern art does not do this. In fact, the opposite happened. Modern art raises the bar of entry for discussion about itself. Rather than the art illuminating something for people who are not as well educated, it obfuscates its purpose (however unintentionally) until a certain level of knowledge and understanding is reached.

Modern art can, I believe, be defined as the result of three major changes in society.

1. The invention of the camera. This is the reason which is usually cited, but it ignores the route along which modern art developed. For that, we need to take into account…

2. The invention of new, concrete and persistent storytelling media: movies and television. Moving pictures are a direct result of the invention of the camera as well, so in a sense, this could fall under number one. But it was a fundamentally new form of entertainment at the time, and in the same way Medieval tapestries provided Bible stories to those who couldn’t read in a nice, easily digestible package of graphics, today’s movies provide Bible stories to those who can’t (or are too lazy to) read in a nice, easily digestible package of graphics. And not just Bible stories, but any sort of genre tale you care to watch.

3. A higher literacy rate allowed more people to take advantage of the previously well-established persistent storytelling medium, the book. Despite Steve Jobs’ pessimistic assessment that “nobody reads anymore”, the fact is that a significant number of people do, and many people also did back at the beginning of the 20th century. Many people were now digesting Bible stories from the actual Bible, and at the same time we see an explosion of pulp fiction for people who liked to read, but weren’t always in the mood for some hard hitting religiosity.

So once again, let’s review what pre-Renaissance art was and did: it was symbolic, it was entertaining, and it was educational. The invention of perspective made art realistic as well as being entertaining and educational. The invention of the camera made it so art no longer needed to be realistic, and it led to new forms of entertainment, so art didn’t have to entertain, either. Add in the simultaneous rise in literacy, and now it doesn’t even have to educate.

In short, art didn’t have to be anything anymore. And this is exactly what what happened. Art became anything and nothing, and for about sixty years people came up with ever more clever ways to out-art other artists. But most important of all, look what modern art did to the idea of “symbols as art”. It cheapened it.

I’m not sure it’s an innate preference for realism that makes most people look down on “unrealistic” symbolic art. I think it results from the combination of five hundred years of realistic art being the norm, but having this suddenly stripped away via the camera; a lack of entertainment value (compared to TV, anyway); and a lack of overt message. When you go to view modern art, you only see one thing: whatever the art is. If it’s a blank canvas on the wall, you see, quite literally, a blank canvas on the wall. In order to get what the point of this blank canvas is, you have to do more work on your own. When you view Kandinsky’s work, if you don’t understand the symbolism of what’s going on, it is, literally, just a mishmash of shapes. It can be a nice mishmash, but it is not inherently saying anything by itself.

Having been assaulted on two fronts—symbolism with a lack of obvious message in art and realism with very obvious messages in film—it is hardly any wonder that the average person considers symbolic art “bad”. Symbolic art can carry extremely powerful messages, but if nobody sees them, to what end? On the other hand, someone can paint a bottle of Tabasco sauce with no thoughts in mind other than “here is a bottle of Tabasco sauce; I will paint it”, and if they capture every tiny highlight in precise detail, it’s “good”, despite having no particular reason to exist.

Additionally, this all happened along with the development of rapid commoditization, forcing these non-realistic, non-entertaining, not obviously educational items to compete in the free market alongside realistic, entertaining and easily understood items. Not surprisingly, “realistic” entertainment won. Symbolic abstraction has been getting the cold shoulder ever since.

Eventually modern art ran out of things to say and the movement died out. This is hardly unexpected, because aside from “art for arts’ sake” and a rabid (if earnest) exploration of what, precisely, art is, there wasn’t much else going on. With the exception of the inevitable political pieces, modern art was built on too few ideas.

Following this trend forward, one might expect that we should see an eventual deconstruction of what makes realism “real” and what makes symbolism “symbolic”. And indeed we have. It’s called postmodernism, and it’s what we’re going through right now. Postmodernism is the realization that “realistic” art is hardly real at all—except in the case where it defines our reality and becomes hyperreal. This is getting off the topic, and maybe I’ll write about it more another day, but the heart of postmodernism says that in our obsession with ever more “real” art, we’ve crossed a line at some point where reality doesn’t seem real anymore. Movies are more real than reality, and hyperreality is in fact, reality. Irony is ambiguous, straight-faced is self-defeating, and ambiguous self-defeat is irony unparalleled.

What we’re left with is symbolic and abstract art which been exploited, and left in the mid-20th century to die a dusty death. Many people equate the symbolic with “poorly drawn” and the realistic with “well drawn”. Despite every person being capable of drawing, many are defined as not being able to draw merely because they draw symbolically rather than realistically, without consideration to the intent of the art. This being a few centuries old problem, I don’t expect it will be solved any time soon, but if we’re getting anywhere with this whole art business, we should probably be trying to get to the point where symbolic art is recognized as valid once again.

-Ted