- Mimesis versus the Avant-Garde:
Art and Cognition
An earlier version of this essay was published online as “Art and Cognition:
Mimesis vs. the Avant Garde,” Aristos, December 2004 http://www.aristos.org/
aris-03/art&cog.htm, and generated a lively debate in the Letters section of
ArtsJournalbetween the author and an abstract painter (search for “Kamhi” at
http://www.artsjournal.com/letters). - By work in a “traditional” vein, I mean representational painting and sculpture in
which form is rendered realistically, not reproduced mechanically. An example of “tra-
ditional” contemporary work would be Frederick Hart’s sculptures for the façade of the
National Cathedral and for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.—as
contrasted with the work of postmodernists such as George Segal and Duane Hanson,
who employed mechanical means of casting figures directly from a live model. Work
such as Hart’s is rarely, if ever, reviewed in the major media, exhibited in “contemporary
art” museums, or taught about in schools and universities. Odd Nerdrum—the subject of
the first essay in this volume—is a notable exemplar of “traditional” contemporary
painting. For more examples of both painting and sculpture, see works displayed by the
Florence Academy of Art http://www.florenceacademyofart.com and the Ann Long
Fine Art gallery http://www.annlongfineart.com. - According to the Guardian(“Back to School for Binmen Who Thought Modern
Art Was a Load of Old Rubbish,” January 13th, 2005), the errant trash collectors in
Frankfurt were subsequently assigned to monthly re-education sessions to familiarize
them with “modern art” (“postmodernist art” would be the more appropriate term here),
to ensure that they would never again make such a mistake. On the incomprehensibility
of avant-garde work, and the incoherence of the criticism dealing with it, see Louis
Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand
(Chicago: Open Court, 2000), Part II, passim. According to the late art historian and
critic Thomas McEvilley—a prominent champion of postmodernist “anti-art”—count-
less works have in fact been deliberately made to defy normal understanding. The
Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-
Modernism,Kingston, NY: McPherson, 2005, 89. - “Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science,” NEH Summer Institute, University of
Maryland, summer 2002; Journal of Consciousness Studies, special issues: “Art and the
Brain,” 1999 and 2000 http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs_6_6-7.html, and “Art, Brain, and
Consciousness,” 2004; Joseph A. Goguen, “What Is Art?” (Introduction to Art and the
Brain, Part 2), Journal of Consciousness Studies, special issue, August–September 2000
http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Introduction.pdf); and “Art and the Mind,” The Monist,
special issue, ed. Nicolas J. Bullot and Pascal Ludwig, October 2003 (see the call for
papers at https://www.mysciencework.com/publication/read/3120921/art-and-the
-mind#page-null. See also Cynthia Freeland, “Teaching Cognitive Science and the
Arts,” Part I, Newsletter of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), Spring 2001,
1–3 http://aesthetics-online.org/articles/index.php?articles_id=11; Parts II (on film)
and III (on Music) are also available at the Aesthetics online site. More recent examples
include George Mather, The Psychology of Visual Art: Eye, Brain, and Art, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013; and Arthur Shimamura, Experiencing Art: In the
Brain of the Beholder, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
200 Notes to Pages 37–38