That man transcends nature is a concept that is important and worthy of defence.  I am astounded that so few people have set out to do this. In fact, with the exceptions of Roger Penrose and John Lucas, I don't think I can mention a single living philosopher of note who has set out to refute the claims of strong A.I.  I am surprised by the absence of a response from any of the Churches.

In order to understand why it matters it is important to appreciate that human life and society are profoundly influenced by ideas. There is a core to human nature that is relatively permanent, but there are also changes.

"It was just at the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion.  I was telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "why don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next night I brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got along."

The first quotation was written in 1847, the second, by Henry Miller, from the Tropic of Capricorn, was written in 1957. There has been a huge sea-change in culture between the two quotations.  Culture is not permanent.

Human life is in constant flux.  Human beliefs and with it human conduct changes from age to age. There is a core to human nature, the passions, vanity and egoism, but there are also profound differences.

But I do not rest my answer to the question, why does it matter? on the enormity of the illusion that it would create. Besides, not everyone does agree that to believe a falsehood is an injury.

So let us be clear as to the consequences of this belief. There are some gawky attempts to claim that computers will have a religious  life, but once we truly come to believe that we are nothing but digital computers, then the belief in transcendence, on which religious life is based, will come to an end.

A child is born.  By the age of four, not long after she can speak, she is using the ipod.* She communicates digitally with Facebook friends that she has never met in the physical word.  She goes to school and she is taught that she is a machine. She is encouraged to play digital games by his peers. Now what attitude to death and what rules of moral conduct does she acquire?

"The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the world leader in cryonics, cryonics research, and cryonics technology. Cryonics is the science of using ultra-cold temperature to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so. Alcor is a non-profit organization located in Scottsdale, Arizona, founded in 1972." www.alcor.org.

"This guide is intended as a companion to the ACS article "Freeze A Jolly Good Fellow," which provides answers to the most frequently asked questions about cryonics and the American Cryonics Society's suspension program." www.americancryonics.org.

"September 18, 2013 – Google today announced Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Arthur D. Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer and a founding investor."  www.businessinsider.com

Human nature is always in flux. The idea of the permanence of death has already lead to changes in human behaviour. People are investing in the cure for death.

This is a change, and it is a change for the worse. Contrast this with the words of C.G. Jung when asked about death. 

That man is in some sense a machine is true.  If we perform surgery we find mechanical parts.  But we have always known this.  It was known to Galen.  What is difficult to grasp nowadays that as a machine man is more than a digital machine; that there is still something special about him, and that there is no need to deny the sense of transcendence that his own unconscious psyche supplies.  

If it becomes accepted that computers are conscious, then our attitudes to death and ethics will change.  It will be perceived as irrational not to believe that death is final and it will be perceived as rational to act out of pure self-interest.  On the one hand, our psyche becomes a mere object to us, and on the other hand, all sentient beings become mere objects to us as well.  We are just one object living among others.

This is what a contemporary nurse writes about people who are dying.

    We experience light as generated at a locus of the brain called the "third eye" - which is situated in the middle of the forehead and just behind it.  In deep meditation it is possible to experience pure light emanating from this centre as waves or pulsations.
    For a given mental experience there is a physical counterpart within the brain, which may extend through a chain of causes outside the brain.  That is to say, an image may arise from a relationship with an object that we believe to be external to the mind.  But this is not always the case, such as in dreams and visions.
    In general we expect a correlation to exist between radiation as it is collected by the eye and the mental experience of light and colour.  Radiation is harvested by the rods and cones of the retina, which produce electrical messages that are sent to the visual cortex and interpreted.  But over-emphasis on this relationship leads to mistaken beliefs: firstly, that light is radiation and, secondly, that the relationship of wavelength to colour is exact.  In mathematical parlance, to the belief that there is a one-one functional relationship between radiation and colour.

    To explain this phenomenon we may refer to what is known about the physiology of colour production within the brain.  Radiation, a phenomenon external to the brain, produces electrical signals in the retina.  It is accepted that there are three kinds of receptor (cones) in the retina - for "green", "blue" and "red" radiation.  These are the primaries.  The mixing of green and red primaries produces yellow, but this yellow does not correspond to an individual stimulus at the level of the retina.  So yellow is created at some later stage within the brain and at the "interface" between mind and brain. At the same time that yellow is manufactured, the brain interprets it as in direct opposition to blue, so it imposes a rule that a colour cannot be simultaneously blue and yellow, and that an admixture of blue and yellow amounts to white light, since it is composed of all three primaries.

    Now let us consider whether this new colour is produced by addition or subtraction.  In fact, both these principles refer to physical processes that occur outside the brain and significantly prior to the production of light and colour, which are mental phenomenona.  Addition is appropriate to the addition of radiation, and subtraction occurs in paint pigments, which arises because paints absorb light and only reflect part of it.  Thus, when addition occurs colours become less saturated and less intense.
    Because both blue and yellow radiation are presented to the left and right eyes respectively, there is no mixing either of radiation or of pigments, so neither addition nor subtraction apply.  However, a radiation sufficient to produce a strong colour sensation is presented to each eye separately, so when the two channels are combined (presumably in the cortex) then the resultant "impossible" or transcendent colour is interpreted as more intense than either radiation separately, and hence has a fluorescent character.  So the combination partakes of the addition of colour, without being identical to it since it is not actually combined as radiation.  The resultant is certainly not white light.  Likewise, the resultant colour partakes of the subtraction of colour.  This is because it is a synthesis of the blue colour presented to the left eye and the yellow to the right, so it is a synthesis of both.  But it is not green because green arises from the pure subtraction of colour pigments as a result of increased absorption of the incipient light, and this colour is more intense not less. 
    It is customary to classify all colours according to a "colour space" or "gamut".  The experiment we have just conducted indicates that the standard gamut must be extended to an extra "dimension", since the "impossible" blue-yellow colour is not represented within it.  It is a combination that lies either behind or in front of the diagram, depending on which way you choose to define your axis of transcendent subtraction of light creating a more intense image than either source.  This lays open the possibility of a transcendent addition of light (resulting in impossible colours but of lower intensity than the sources).  Furthermore, the term "dimension" must be used with care - since any two colours may have transcendent subtractive and additive combinations, any attempt to create a geometric (vector) space out of these colours is doomed.  It is not a dimension in the usual sense.

    The problem of colour composition in a painting is to juxtapose different colours without producing a kind of mental dyspepsia.  It is for this reason that over the centuries artists have evolved the one colour, two colour and three colour compositions.  In a one colour composition, just one colour dominates and all other regions are variations of that colour, or close approximations.  It is the safest way in which to produce a painting that is harmonious, and most successful colour compositions work on this principle in one way or another, even where there are apparently two principle colours, or even three.
    Nonetheless, since the additive mixing of pigments produces duller colours, it follows that for the artist the primary colours are all and every pigment that he or she uses.  If you wish to have a pure green, then you must start with a pigment that is pure green, such as cadmium green.   You cannot mix a pure green from blue and yellow.

    Typically, a painter begins by laying a ground, that is often white, and in Renaissance times could be comprised of white lead in oil.  Then he makes an under-painting, usually in earth colours such as raw umber.  Finally, he starts to build up layers with other pigments.  Pigments may, of course, be mixed on the palette prior to application, but it is also possible to work a single pigment onto the surface.  The assumption here is that by placing layer up on layer a complex colour effect will develop.  If one wishes to model the soft effect of light falling on a shoulder, then alternating between successive layers of titanium white, for the light, and browns, pinks and yellows for the shadows can produce the desired result.  Each thin layer is called a glaze.

This is a question for scientific research, but I can speak from experience.  Firstly, since in oil painting every layer is translucent, even when a so-called "opaque" pigment is used, then every layer can contribute to the overall impression.  Secondly, in practice, after three layers the fourth layer seems to start to disappear.  However, this is partly illusion, because, thirdly, the painting seems "finished" when the application of a top layer is no longer able to make a significant difference by itself to the overall colour, tone and modeling of the image.  This proves that the three layers "rule" is an illusion, since here a single layer makes minimal difference to the surface impression.  This is because the "volume" of radiation emitted from the lower layers is now overwhelming.  

Layering and transcendent colours

In our first experiment with transcendent colours, above, we combined blue radiation with yellow radiation presented to different eyes.  But we now see that there is another way of combining colours by presenting them to each eye simultaneously.  This is through layering. 
    Consider a layered surface in which there is some alternation of different pigments between the layers.  For definiteness, consider alternating blue with yellow pigments in layers.  Then each eye individually experiences blue and yellow in layers.  We may hypothesise that reception of the radiation is also differentiated and layered.  Thus, from a single eye, it is possible to relay to the cortex signals corresponding to distinct blue and yellow hues; so the same transcendent subtractive combination occurs in the cortex as would occur had the different colours been presented to different eyes, and a transcendent colour is produced.
    I am suggesting that part of the mystery and supernatural quality of the work of Leodardo comes from the experience of transcendent colours in his work.  I should add some explanatory remarks.  (1) I am not assuming that Leonardo is alternating between yellows and blues in his work, which I am considering for illustrative purposes only.  Nonetheless, blues may be present in a part that may be experienced as overall transcendent brown.  (In fact, van Eyck is famous for his frequent use of ultramarine glazes throughout his paintings.)  Predominantly, Leonardo will be alternating between lighter and darker pigments of his palette.  But, in fact, there is evidence that Leonardo used lapis lazuli (true ultramarine) in his composition of the Mona Lisa.  This would produce layers of ultramarine and browns and hence transcendent colours.  (2) I suggest that every combination of different pigments in layers produces a colour judged by the mind to be transcendent.  So the argument presented here does not depend on just one transcendent colour combination. (3) It should also be born in mind that transcendent colours are not different hues, in the sense, for example, in which green is a different hue to either blue or yellow.  Transcendent colours are colours that are judged (unconsciously) by the mind to simultaneously partake of two colours without being a blend of them.  For example, blue-yellow as opposed to green.
    From this point of view, rather than being unusual and "impossible", transcendent colours are normal, or should be.  I say, "should be", because those surfaces that produce stable hues would, according to this theory, be those that are uniform throughout their layers.  Such surfaces are artificial.  For example, a manufactured paint that is uniformly mixed and put on in several layers to produce a surface in which the radiation is wholly undifferentiated. 

    A polished metallic surface is a layered one.  Polishing increases the smoothness of the surface, so light penetrating the surface is reflected uniformly, at the same angle, rather than scattered.  The metal ions which absorb the incipient radiation and re-emit it are arranged in a crystal lattice that can be considered as a series of layers.  Radiation does not get all absorbed by the first layer; most of it passes through several layers.  Thus, light emitted from a polished metallic surface is layered.  I suggest that it is this layering that is responsible for the mental experience of a metallic colour.  Metallic colours are transcendent.  It is the layering itself that produces metallic lustre, but there may be some variation also in the wavelengths of the radiation.

    The Iliad, written around C7th B.C. is about an idealised past, set about four or five centuries previously. Yet for Homer's audience the idea of the gods walking among them was not inherently impossible, but whether they thought they had examples of this in their own lives is not clear.  It is not absurd to think so.  We may assume that their experience of immanence fell short of the depiction in the epic, but they were sufficiently familiar with it to feel no strangeness in the representation.  The idealisation is also supported by the notion of the decay of man – a proto version of the fall – in which the heroes belong to a distant better age, were stronger, bigger than contemporary specimens of humanity, and closer to the gods.  Some of them were children of the gods, some were their lovers.  

     "You must know, O Ascelpius, the power and force of man.  Just as the Lord and Father is the creator of the gods of heaven, so man is the author of the gods who reside in the temples.  Not only does he receive life, but he gives it in his turn.  Not only does he progress towards God, but he makes gods."
    "Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?"
    "Yes, the statues, Ascelpius.  They are animated statues full of sensus and spiritus who can accomplish many things, foretelling the future, giving ills to men and curing them."

This statement also represents an idealisation of the past - a  hearkening back to an imaginary time when people conversed with art, and  not merely stood before it.  Though we are excluded by our crystalline consciousness from any experience  that might correspond to the experience of gods in temples, it is not unreasonable to assume that the initiates of temples had some kind of psychological experience akin to conversing with the gods.

    As Christianity ascended to its dominant position we acquired a different attitude to art: while the gods did not literally inhabit the statues that depicted them, works of art could nonetheless mediate between man and god.  The Icon was born.  The mystical depiction of God  - now as Christ, or his Mother, now as the dying god of the Cross, now as the divine child - could assist the adept in his progression to god - not through conversation, but through meditation, mediation and imitation.  This was the Age of Faith.
    There was no shortage of philosophical justifications for this attitude of veneration.  The representation of Christ as an icon answered the obvious question, "What did the Lord look like?" and  invoked an attitude of veneration towards Christ, identified as an archetype.  St. Basil the Great (329 - 379 AD) wrote, "The honour shown the image passes over to the archetype."  The attitude was supported by the belief that man was created in the image of god, and that Christ was God incarnate.

   Despite the diminution of the devotional attitude, Greek myths were regarded as useful sources of moral and philosophical points; we looked through the portal of the painting into an abstract world of ideas.  
    No one who contemplates contemporary society could be unaware that since the Renaissance our attitude has undergone a further alteration, and that we now inhabit the "Age of Plastic" - a period in which all vestiges of the ancient veneration of art as a portal onto a divine or higher world has been lost.  It would seem that all connection between art and the gods has been lost.

    The crisis in the Greco-Roman world began around 500 BC when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Democritus, Sophocles and Euripides all questioned the whether the myths handed down to them about their gods could be literally true.  Plato, for example, is hostile towards Homer and would ban poetry from his Republic because of its corrupting influence.  Nonetheless, faith in the gods as reflected in the myths persisted and it was the task of thinkers to reconcile this faith with some higher notion of godhead.  The best of these attempts is reflected in the works of Sophocles and Euripides who interpreted the gods as archetypes.

    It is often said that Eurpides represents a new scepticism towards the existence of the gods.  One must accept that a critical attitude towards myth is reflected in his work, but atheism is not.  He stands towards the beginning of a whirlwind crisis of faith that swept the ancient world for he acknowledges that the true identity of the gods, or god, cannot be revealed in the myths as we have them. Herakles, the man, who in the grip of an archetype, murders his wife and family, speaks for Eurpides:

What you say of the gods is hardly relevant.
I don’t believe gods tolerate unlawful love. 
Those tales of chainings are unworthy; I never did
And never will accept them; nor that any god
Is tyrant of another.  A god, if truly god,
Needs nothing.  Those are poets’ lamentable myths.

    A similar response is created in Alcestis, which is the story of a wife prepared to sacrifice herself for her husband.  Medea, the story of a woman who murders her children in order to revenge herself on her husband, Jason,  is somewhat different, for the protagonist Medea is infernally evil and Jason does not make the essential step towards self-knowledge, so his fate hangs in the balance.  Thus, although  it is true that there is a questioning aspect to the work of Euripides that places him in a new world that is full of doubt and uncertainty with regard to the nature of the gods, Euripides was not a non-believer, and his attitude towards Greek myth was also highly respectful. 

    There is a myth that photographs represent reality.   This a myth, because cameras do not see at all.    
    It is true that what cameras reproduce accords to the laws of perspective.  By contrast, the human mind-eye does see, but as a literal fact, not in perspective.  Although the human lens is similar to the lens of a camera, the images we see are constructed in the brain for the mind, and the mind’s eye invests everything that it sees with its knowledge.  Nature is full of concepts. 
    We have two terms – reality and nature.  I shall reserve the word reality for what is altogether transcendent.  We do not directly perceive reality. 
    What we do directly see, hear, touch and so forth, I shall call nature.  Nature in this sense is a construct of the human mind, and does not exist independently of the mental endeavour to understand “what it sees”.  Yet it is nature –  it is precisely what we grasp with our senses – the very things we see.  The raw material, the un-interpreted sensory information received by the eye, is never directly experienced in consciousness; what is seen is that which has already been interpreted.  We are generally unaware of this active process of interpretation by the mind because it takes place at an unconscious level. 

Within this very body, mortal though it be, and only a fathom high, but conscious and endowed with mind, is the world.   THE BUDDHA

    Nature is not a given something in front of which one can set a lens and passively record.  Nature only exists before and for the mind.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.  PAUL CEZANNE

    To focus a lens means to bring an object into sharper definition.  To focus for a human mind means to pay closer attention to the object in view – to study it – to reach for an understanding of it, to bring that understanding into consciousness.  A camera as such can never focus in this sense, though the possibility of photography as art rests on the ability of the photographer to use the camera as if it were his mind’s eye.  Looking is not the same as seeing.

I don’t paint things.  I only paint the difference between things.  HENRI MATISSE

    Because nature is not a given something but is constructed for the benefit of the mind, our experience of nature is always charged with emotion.  A human being cannot look at anything without having some kind of emotional reaction to it; we have strong words, too, for the extremes of this reaction – beauty, the sublime, love, passion – and terms of negative emotion – hatred, anger, disappointment, disgust. 

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all... feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end.  PAUL CEZANNE

A camera, merely as a camera and not as the instrument of the artist, never records emotion.  Emotion is only ever depicted in a photograph by virtue of the human ability to project emotion into what it sees.  In other words, the human mind learns to interpret photographs as if they were nature.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.  ORSON WELLS.

When looking at photographs the human mind reinvents what is given in raw sensation to make the photograph seem more natural.  In effect, and unconsciously, we lie to ourselves in order to convince ourselves that what we see in a photograph is nature.
    In fact, interpreting photographs is a social skill that in our Western cultures we learn from an early age and take for granted.  We get very lazy when looking at photographs.  But the skill of understanding that a photograph is supposed to be a depiction of nature, if it has not been learned in early childhood, is an overwhelmingly difficult task for the mind.  Take a photograph to a remote place in the world, if one still exists, show the aboriginals there a photograph of yourself, and they will not understand or see what on earth it is.  To understand a photograph is not an innate skill, but a social skill acquired in childhood.  And something else is lost in the process.

Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.   PABLO PICASSO

One consequence of this social skill is that we accept as “good” photographic images that would look absurd if replicated in a drawing.  For example, when shadows fall on a hand so as to make the hand look like rubber.  The depiction of a hand to reveal an element of structure is very important when making a drawing of one. 

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance.  ARISTOTLE

There is a curious double-bind at work these days: we go to an Art Fare, see a painting of a photograph that represents a hand as a piece of rubber, and then convince ourselves, because it is a painting of a photograph that the hand looks “real”.  It’s a joke!

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.  AUGUSTE RODIN

Because nature is always replete with emotion, that art which copies nature, has never sought to replicate it the manner in which a camera may be said to replicate it.  Artists have never sought to replicate things in this sense.  Do you think Goya or David attempted to replicate what they see?  Like all artists, they charge their works with the emotion that they already found replete in nature. 

Art is a harmony in parallel with nature.   PAUL CEZANNE

Art is primarily concerned with the expression of value.  In portraiture, art is sometimes concerned with the expression of character, which is a spiritual value.  The work of Ingres is a good illustration. 
    What the artist does when he or she draws from life is nothing like and never has been like what taking a snap involves.  When drawing from nature the artist tries to bring into consciousness and so depict on the paper what his mind does unconsciously in its construction of nature.
    The eye sees in three dimensions created from the stereographic superposition of slightly different images from both eyes – separated by the nose.  A drawing is a two dimensional reproduction of three-dimensional solids and must inevitably employ conventions.  These conventions are derived from the unconscious manner in which the mind interprets space – by creating borders and differential shades where surfaces meet.  The mind is active in this process, thus separating the mental image from the photograph irrevocably. 
    I have nothing pejorative to say against photography as art.  I do not decry it, but I am not a photographer myself.  What I can say is that when photography becomes art, the photographer plays the same game as the artist.  He arranges the image, or selects from copious copies of the same event; he arranges the lighting; he arranges the exposure, and so on.  So, by means of the choices of the photographer, the photograph interprets what it sees, and so mirrors the unconscious processes of the mind.  Thus photography becomes art.

Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature.  This is proved by the rarity of the ‘good’ photograph.  LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY

    For the artist to draw directly from photographs is as dangerous as injecting heroin.  Dangerous for his art, and problematic for his soul.  It is a bad habit and likely to lead to bad effects.  The artist must see and look; and photographs provide only limited possibilities for this.  It is not that it is entirely impossible to use photographs in some way as a source, but just that the habit so addles the brain that once it has developed it’s hard to get out of it.  And what if you’ve built yourself some kind of reputation as an artist on the basis of copying photographs, making a grid or projecting them onto a blank canvass and painting by numbers; and then you wake up in the middle of the night one day in a cold sweat, in a blue funk, and realise you can’t draw?  It’s embarrassing.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.  LEONARDO DA VINCI

    I would not deprecate the use of photographs as an aide memoir.  To a sculptor learning anatomy good photographs of models are very useful.  One should look at photographs in the same way one looks at nature – to know, understand and love the visible world.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.   KENNETH CLARK

    Although the artist never sees reality, which is transcendent, he can conceive of it.  With his concrete physical and fertile imagination he seeks to render into visual form the products of his imagination.  Symbolist and abstract art reflect just two aspects of this desire to seek beyond nature.
    The characteristic feature of a great artist is imagination.  When one looks at the works of a master, of every age, whatever the genre or style, one is immediately gripped by a sensation of transport – how could he do this?  How could he visualise this? 

Design, which by another name is called drawing is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all sciences.  MICHELANGELO.

    Imagination appears to be an accidental gift to those who have not taken the trouble to acquire it.  To be imaginative is to be full of invention and inspiration; it is to be capable of rendering the ineffable and transcendent reality into visual form.  But to have this power does not come about by chance.  It is not an accident that some are more imaginative than others; it is the product of work.

If the artist has not drawn a great deal and studied carefully selected ancient and modern works, he cannot by himself work well from memory or enhance what he copies from life.   VASARI

    You do not acquire imagination by limping  on the crutches of copying photographs.  It’s impossible.  Imagination begins with seeing and looking.  To acquire imagination we must start by observing nature, and not by copying photographs.  For, as you and I well know...

A man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.  ANDRE BRETON.

Place two coins at equal distance on a flat surface from your eye and look!

Our unconscious mind knows that the second coin is similar to the first and this knowledge causes us to unconsciously increase the size of the more distant object.  We do not see in perspective.
    Given that nature is what we see, this means that photographs distort nature.  They never represent nature.  This is a literal truth.

Turnbull's study
"Turnbull studied the Bambuti pygmies, who live in the dense rain forests of the Congo, a closed-in world without open spaces.  Turnbull brought a pygmy out to a vast plain where a herd of buffalo were grazing in the distance.  The pygmie said he had never seen one of those insects before; when told they were buffalo, he was offended and Turnbull was accused of insulting his intelligence.  Turnbull drove the jeep towards the buffalo; the pygmy's eyes widened in amazement as he saw the insects 'grow' into buffalo before him.  He concluded that witchcraft was being used to deceive him."  From Gross, Psychology.

Deregowski's study
Deregowski strudied the Me'en tribe of Ethiopia.  A woman was presented with a photograph of a human head in profile.  "She discovered in turn the nose, the mouth, the eye, but where was the other eye?  I tried by turning my profile to explain why she could see only one eye, but she hopped round to my other side to point out that I possessed a second eye which the other lacked."  Quoted in Gross, Psychology.

Using the street art of Den Haag as an example, I shall explore what contemporary art has to say about man and society.  It is primarily a sociological inquiry upon which I am embarking.
    But rather than starting in the street, let us begin our journey in the Gemeetemuseum, the principal art museum of Den Haag, where the curators have felt the need to add helpful explanations to accompany some of the modern works on display.
    The comment on Bourgeois's Cell XXVI (1) indicates fear as the artist's subject, and we understand immediately that with contemporary art we are in the domain of the twisted and tortured modern psyche.   Nowhere in contemporary art do we escape this theme.  This piece cries out to us, "I am in pain!"
    Naturalism in the representation of the human figure is rejected in favour of primitive elements of distortion.   Imprisonment and torture are metaphors for the contemporary experience of the self.
    Bruce Nauman's Carousel (2) also exemplifies this theme.  The helpful curator comments:
    "This is not a merry kind of carrousel you would find at a funfair.      These leashed animals conjure up associations with a poacher’s         trap.  They are casts of stuffed animals.  So they have no eyes, ears,     claws or hooves – and no genitals.  They evoke an image of                 mutilation.  We simultaneously feel compassion and disgust.              Nauman seeks that contradiction deliberately."
    The key words I extract from this are mutilation and disgust.  Technically, also, these are casts - so the artist does not feel impelled by an inner need to create form independently of what he has already found.  The work hovers precariously between sadism and repulsion.  This piece is appropriately set in front of a Triptych (3) by Francis Bacon (1902 - 1992); it is Bacon's work that pioneered the path towards the free representation of mutilation as a theme.  In an adjoining room we have Berlinde De Bryckere's representation of a mutilated human figure (4) ; in the background there is a bleak landscape by Anselm Keifer  (5) which is reminiscent of the scenes of trench warfare - alternatively, symbolic of death, mutilation and crisis.
    When I visited the Gemeetemuseum there was an exhibition on show dedicated to the theme of love.  If the artists are anything to go by, contemporary man has difficulty dealing with the positive aspects of love, and the exhibition abounded with images of torture and distortion.  Two which I choose to illustrate here are (6) a stuffed cat by Anselm Keifer, and (7) a still from a film that looked, somewhat humorously to be sure, at the modern obsession with vampirism.  At the time I was visiting the museum I was accompanied by an 11 year old boy and a 9 year old girl.  In addition to the many images of self-loathing, coupled to disgust and obsession with nakedness, there were several representations of a phallus on display - one bejeweled.  The curators of the museum charge a modest entry fee to adults, but generously make the museum and its exhibitions free for children.  So we see that children are encouraged from an early age to associate love and the human body with negative emotions; although the obsession with the phallus is arguably neutral in tone, the general impression is one of dissolution and despair.
    Such representations are ubiquitous and wholly unrelieved by anything positive or celebratory, so it is not possible to infer that these are accidental works of possibly mentally disturbed people.  On the contrary these are the creations of normal people.  From these emotional outpourings we may judge that people in the Western world commonly experience a kind of inner crisis in relation to their self-image.
    It is not difficult to see from whence this emotion may have arisen.  Modern philosophy affirms very strongly that we are human meat, soulless mechanisms with fragile egos, metaphorically floating on an ocean of unconscious animal urges.  It is a profoundly disturbing and disgusting image of the self, and one that therefore finds expression in art.  To be sure, these negative images of the self arise against the backdrop of ugly politics and disturbing social history, the mutilation of conflict and war, but there has been no century free of those social aspects, and likewise, no period so preoccupied with such self-loathing.  And if, this analysis is not correct, then what alternative explanation for this social phenomenon that we call contemporary art can be offered? - for the ubiquitous presence of the motif of mutilation cannot be denied.
    Turing now to the sculpture commissioned by the City Council that we find in the streets of Den Haag, let me conduct you down The Kalvermarkt and its connecting Grote Marktstraat.  (The names of the artists are not given on the works, so these must now be unattributed here.)  There is a piece (8) of two struggling male torsos, back to back.  It builds on the figurative tradition, and presents a forceful image of pointless conflict.  It is not a contemporary work; nonetheless, the incipient theme of mutilation is present.
    The city council of Den Haag likes sculpture and has commissioned a lot of it.  There is a good deal of humour present in these works, though of the cynical variety.  Outside the newly erected Bibliotheek there is an amusing piece (9) that I believe is a satire on marriage.  The image reminds me of that brilliant attack on the Victorian institution of marriage The Owl and the Pussycat  by Edward Lear.

            Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
                How charmingly sweet you sing!
            O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
                But what shall we do for a ring?'
            They sailed away, for a year and a day,
                To the land where the Bong-tree grows
            And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
                With a ring at the end of his nose,
                      His nose,
                      His nose,
                With a ring at the end of his nose.

As the principal work commissioned by a capital city this sculpture, nothing so brilliant in its invention as Lear's poem, is an odd choice.  What really does it say about the contemporary experience of relationship?  It is very cynical.
    That theme of cynicism is reflected in other pieces, not always with such good humour.  One that I shall call Pinocchio (10) pours scorn on the human form; another (11) is a crude and clumsy representation of what I take to be a mother and daughter, scorning that relationship with mutilated arms, disproportionate features and scarred legs.  An image of a middle aged gentleman (12) ridicules vanity, with distorted head and falsely modest downcast eyes.  A Disney like duck-man (13) loudly pokes fun at inanity.  There is a satirical homage (14) to the unknown citizen.  These pieces portray man as shallow, vain, empty and hollow.
    The other theme of the Grote Marktstraat is the phallus; and there are liberal representations of this - in fact, practically every work on display is a phallus.  (15 to 23.)
     What are these artists trying to say to us, or what unconscious forces account for these images?  Is it fertility that we celebrate here?  We are told that the phallus is not a totem (which is an image of a plant or animal emblematic of a social group), but rather a boundary marker.  Perhaps these are unconsciously related to the same forces that lead men to mark territory by graffiti, and also by urinating?   However, please do not misunderstand me - in many ways I like these pieces; but the question as to what forces can account for them remains a valid one, and I am not suggesting that I have closed off all possible theories.  Maybe they represent symbols of the ultimate man, the divine gift of God.
    But that is not likely in the context of a culture that is avowedly atheist and increasingly so.
    Yet another question remains - and that concerns the future.  Now that we have entered a cultural condition in which we (a) don't believe in spirit, (b) do believe that man is meat, and (c) experience our own psyches as disturbed, is there any way out of this morass, if that is what it is?  For these images may sometimes be made in stone, but they are not all that exists, or all that can be said about man and his society.  One thinks, sooner or later, man will grow tired of such representations, just as he has grown tired of everything else.  Perhaps.
    But that way out is not likely to be taken unless there is a spiritual revolution of some kind.  Thus, the two sides of the equation must be addressed - art and philosophy.  For art by itself cannot save itself.  Images of the beauty of man are by themselves powerless to move, when they are addressed to people who are convinced that man is excrement.  It is the excrement, the painting of shit on the wall, that speaks.  But what if that philosophy is just plain wrong?  What if man is not excrement? What if, notwithstanding the fact that man has a material aspect - that he is a body and a machine - man is also something else - something for which, and for want of the better word, can be described as spirit?
    Then the decision of the city of Den Haag to portray so many variations on a single theme will look like just madness.
    It will also look like indoctrination.
   There is nothing unusual or distinctive about the contemporary art in Den Haag - it is the same as the art you will find in every city of the Western world - wherever the contemporary philosophy has penetrated, there you will find it.

_

The Unknown Citizen  by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Expressionism

The central premise of expressionism is that emotions do not come in proportion.  Therefore, to express an emotion or emotionally charged idea, some form of deliberate exaggeration of form is possible.  Expressionism of this kind is a highly conscious stage of mental and spiritual development on the part of the artist, and can only be reached through long study of nature.  In sculpture, the exemplar of expressionism is Rodin, though, perhaps surprisingly, Michaelangelo is also an expressionist in this respect.

Abstraction

    The abstract arises from long and patient observation of nature, resulting in a power of the artist to "see into the light of things"  -  to abstract from nature certain forms and patterns.  In sculpture Michaelangelo is an abstract artist.  In painting, an exemplar of abstract art is Vermeer.   Expressionism and abstraction are not mutually exclusive.  Furthermore, the distinction between classical and romantic has nothing to do with it.

The primitive

Art that is primitive is art that is unaware that representation may not be true to nature.  But it is crucially important to understand that there are two aspects to primitive art: the primitive-magical and the primitive-crude.  Art originally arose in relation to the divine.  In its most magical and original conception, there is no idea whatsoever of representation - the work of art is god.  The statue of the goddess is the goddess for she inhabits the material and is identical to it.
    The primitive-magical is laden with emotional power, and modern artists, such as Picasso, have famously delved back into the primitive and magical orgins of art in their attempts to rejuvenate art and consciousness.  Picasso was a natural primitive - a man whose psyche was close to the divine, though in the chthonic sense of the gods of the earth and underworld.  Whenever one encounters an emotion and attempts to represent unwittingly that emotion in form, then one encounters the primtive as magic.  This is a true foundation of all art.
    Modern man is a creature of a peculiar kind of consciousness that has become detatched from his primitive roots of emotion, the divine and magic.  That is to say, the primtive-magic in art cannot be immitated.  One is either brim full of passion, or one is not.  
    There arises in the context of modern consciousness  another kind of primitive art, which is the primitive-crude.  This is an unsophisticated and crude attempt at representation that simply does not consider the possibility that the result may be both passionless and false to nature.  This is the curse of much contemporary art, and precisely that which condemns it to banality.

What is nature?

The question, what is nature?  is too big to be wholly considered here.  However, we can say that nature is not a passive or mechanical representation of what is seen.  That is to say, a photograph is never nature.  This observation immediately condemns attempts at photorealism to the primitive-crude.  Nature arises from seeing, and seeing is active.  Seeing involves interpretation, and is mediated by concepts.  Thus, nature arises from the dual interplay of receiving impressions (the "passive" aspect) and understanding them (the "active" aspect).
    Naturalism involves the deliberate attempt to raise to consciousness the processes of active interpretation that the mind unconsciously imposes on impressions. 
    The artist deliberately looks at his models and attempts to recreate the structural understanding that he finds there.    
    Hence: ignore naturalism at your peril, for no matter how outwardly successful you are your art runs the threat of being condemned to banality; unless you draw on exceptional sources of the primitive as magic, your art will be empty, hollow and just crude.

Academic art

Historically, most art that has been classified as "naturalist" is not naturalist - it is a form of primitive-crude art.  It is precisely this primitive-crude art that has earned naturalism a bad name.  Needless to say the banal copying of photographs that is so much in vogue just now just heaps more undeserved criticism on naturalism, for what most people understand by nature is what they see through their camera lens, and that is precisely what it is not.
    Likewise, the distinction between classical and romantic art is separate from the distinction between primtive and natural.  Classicism involves being passionate about ideals and reason; romanticism involves being highly rational about passion.
    Great art that is not brim full of primitive-magic is natural; where it is expressionist or abstract it builds on the natural, and is not an alternative to it.  Being not natural is simply the same as getting it wrong.
    Being passionate about nature is a vehicle for developing emotional charge - in other words, close attention to nature brings one closer to the primtive magical and in a manner of speaking to god.
    In history artists of great spirit intensely study nature - in so doing they arrive at conclusions and these conclusions often take abstract form.  Subsequently, lesser spirits, instead of studying nature, study those forms, and academic art is born.  Academic art is primitive-crude art that arises in a social context of imitation and is fostered by decadence and the failure of criticism.
    Such is the generally sorry state of the art of our times.

Caveat

In art, as in all things, there are many paths to greatness.  Among these paths there is that which leads from the primitive through naturalism and beyond.  Here  I illustrate specific failures, not general ones.

Why a photograph is not a representation of nature
This is a topic worthy of many pages.  But the simplest illustration is from a camera.  Hold your camera up to any reasonably distant object.  The image on the camera screen is immediately perceived to be very much smaller than the one presented to your eye.  The mind unconsciously judges an object on the basis of what it knows about it.  It enlarges objects.  The camera "sees" in perspective; the eye-mind does not.  Nature is what is presented to human consciousness, not what is given in three-dimensional projective geometry.  Since the work of the Gestalt psychologists this has been well documented, and there is nothing new in this remark, save that many contemporary artists seem to be ignorant of it.  Art is primarily the business of interpretion, not a passive act but an active one. 

Since 1945 no modern person could with certainty be included within the top 100 or even 200 of all time great artists.  Lucian Freud, Mark Rothco and Henry Moore are fine artists, all of whom are dead; it would be difficult to say for certain that there were any contemporary living heavyweights equivalent to the like of artists such as Michaelangelo, Goya or Gauguin.
    Why is this?  What is it about contemporary art that fails to produce greatness?
    A partial answer is found in the economics of art.  To be great an artist must live long enough to reach maturity during which time he must be able to eat while producing continuously.  It is not enough to be driven by inner need to express himself and produce, he must be able to feed himself as well.

The gestation period

There are those that believe in  the old soul.  I note that in music and mathematics we witness the phenomenon of the child prodigy.  While every one of these prodigies has some favourable situation – such as parents who nuture the talent of their offspring – there is attraction in the idea that these great figures come into the world bearing with them the fruits of their labours in former lives.  As Wordsworth writes, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." (1)
    Nonetheless, in the case of the visual arts, a glance at the top 100 reveals the startling observation that there are no childhood prodigies.  This reflects the inherent difficulty of the work of the artist who primarily interprets reality as it is presented to his eye and translates this into a two- or three-dimensional structure.  At the same time he works with ideas and emotions in one respect, with such things as texture and colour in another, and in yet another with the sheer physical aspect of art: materials, mediums - the mechanics of producing paintings, sculptures, etchings and so forth. 

On feeding oneself

 What did these great artists do while reaching their period of maturity?  Answer: in general, they were practising artists.  There are exceptions: Van Gogh was an art dealer, Gauguin was a stock-broker, but generally these great artists during their “infancy” belong to the second or third flight of artists.  They still live by means of their art.
    Historically, artists were able to fund themselves in a number of ways: portraits, reproductions of other works, engravings, illustrations, genre paintings, lesser devotional works, and so on and so forth.  Hence, the profound observation about our contemporary scene: all these “mainstays” of the artist’s economic livelihood have more or less disappeared.
    The Contemporary scene does support artists to a limited extent - though one hardly comparable, for instance, with professional football.  There are three categories: -
● The extremely famous
● The “named” artist.
● The “unnamed” artist.

    Most people nowadays choose an original work of art because they think it matches the colour scheme of the interior design of their living space.
    To sustain any reasonable rate of pay (that is, say, relative to the Greek minimum wage) an artist must produce each work in less than forty hours per piece.  The unscrupulous hone this down to twenty or even ten.
    Perhaps artists in the second category of “named” artists can migrate to the status of great artists?  To explain why not, one would have to look additionally at sociological and ideological forces.  Let us leave that for another occasion, but suffice it to say that: -

    Many of the works attributed to Damien Hirst are not in fact made by him.  They are made by assistants.  According to his own account, the best of his spot paintings are made by Rachel Howard, and he “couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it.”  The BBC writes that Hirst "employs up to 100 people in a "factory" that works as a production line for his spot paintings."  The platinum and diamond skull, For the Love of God, which was made by the London jeweller Bentley & Skinner, failed to make its reserve price of $50m and was purchased by a consortium including Damien Hirst.  The exhibition of works by his own hand at the Wallace Collection was slated by art critics, including Adrian Searle in The Guardian, who called Hirst’s paintings “amateurish and adolescent”.  Hirst rose to prominence initially as a curator of exhibitions.

    A patron is a person who commissions and supports other artists.  Therefore, Damien Hirst is a patron.
    The importance of patrons in the evolution of art is without question: one only has to think of the contribution made by Ambroise Vollard to the inception of C20th art, and of the Medicis to the Renaissance.  Associated with Vollard are Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso; associated with the Medicis are Massaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo and Leonardo.
    The dialogue between patron and artist has been the inspiration behind art forever.  One expects the artist to be a person of independence and integrity, but every artist knows the joy of working with another mind, the love of developing mutually shared ideas into their physical manifestation.
    

    Hirst describes his own attempts at spot paintings as "shit compared to ... the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant.”  Hirst’s own eloquent rationale for this practice is that "Art goes on in your head”.  He comes up with the idea of death – passes this inspiration to the artist and purchases the result.  Like a good entrepreneur he is willing to distribute works to other patrons – he is famous for his Warehouse shows.
    It has been said of anyone who writes good sonnets that such a person must not only be in love with another person, but also in love with the sonnet as form.  One distinguishing mark of an artist is his closeness to the physical process of creation.  He or she cannot be separated from the materials or the labour.
    

    To be sure, some artists do use assistants, for there are many routine aspects to art that devour time.  Historically, artists manufactured their own paints.  Leonardo, who began his career as pupil to Verrocchio, also employed assistants; yet, though I am reminded of Vasari’s many descriptions of the sheer excellence of Leonardo da Vinci skills, and the claim that Verrocchio gave up painting when he saw his student excel him, it is Vasari’s opening description of Leonardo in his Lives of the Artists that is most moving: -
    “In the normal course of events many men and women are born with various remarkable qualities and talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.”

    Is it possible that Hirst is the only human being to have given his own name to all the works of the artists he himself employed?  But there is another artist of divine origin who has come close.  In The Illiad Homer attributes the shield of Achilles to Hephaestus, the god of smithies.  It is a frequent theme of Homer’s work, for the humble armourers were too modest to take credit for their own divine creations.  
    Hirst is the contemporary Hephaestus and to see a god he merely has to look in the mirror.