What I think is really interesting is that when Einstein was working out his Theory of Relativity artists like Picasso were doing cubist paintings which to me seem to represent visually what Einstein was saying. Picasso was giving us a relativistic view of things. I don't particularly like his painting as a visual expression but love them as a metaphor for the times. Think about it. The world seemed to be changing on all levels not just art and physics. Social institution were breaking down too. It seems it was a time of great metaphysical changes in the human psyche (a greek word for soul, by the way). Social relativism began seeping into our social structure. Moral systems that we thought were inviolate began to crumble. We began to question the existence of the God of our youth. As a society we began leaving pre critical naiveté behind. The consequences have been profound. The question is, "Who started it all?" Picasso? Einstein? Us? Fate? W.B. Yeats wrote, "The Second Coming" about that time too. In it he describes a world that is coming apart, where "the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity". Sound sort of familiar, doesn't it?
posted by Anne Coe | 5:37 AM
3 Comments:
Well, I can tell you one thing for sure and that is that Picasso would have loved to think he was the prophet who brought all changes about, but he was not. In earlier days, the late 1800s--post Darwin--artists were very influenced by the work of scientists, and earlier than that by the actual prophets from formal religion. There was no change in the structure of the human mind or in its cellular content (unless you go to the level of the vibrations), or the number of synaptic connections-the psyche on a basic level. What changed was a way of looking at things and this influenced all of western civilization. I think the artists were the copiers, not the originators of profound thought.
That is an interesting "chicken and egg" question. Did Jules Verne influence the events that followed, or was he prescient? I fail to see the connection with Picasso's work and relativity theory. Science is often translated into lay language, and the words tend to create impressions of the science that may or may not be representative of what the theories really are. An example would be the difference between 'nuclear waste' and thermonuclear waste. Thermonuclear reactions happen when nuclei fuse together to form a new nucleus. The most common is to unite two hydrogen (deuterium) nuclei to form helium. Thermonuclear waste is therefore clean. waste from 'nuclear fission' in a reactor results in many isotopes, a fraction of which are radioactive. Nuclear fission waste is harder to say, and people would accept the use of thermonuclear even if it is incorrect.
Relativity theory probably means different things to different people. I doubt that Einstein meant it to be a philosophical concept, just a mathematical one that followed logically from the work of James Maxwell (Maxwell's equations).
What I see and hear now is the concept of "Intelligent Design" as a "reason" to accept the existence of a god. This seems to me to be similar to the "cargo cult" who could not comprehend the airplane or its inhabitants, so now they build idols of airplanes and incorporate them into their theology. We are on a return path to the naive view.
In regards to Geode's comment-are not all of us cargo cultists on some level? Einstein was able to transcend linear thought patterns so prevalent during the industrial age, and I see CoeVerts' point regarding the relationship between Einsteins' transcendance of linear thought and Picasso's transcendance of representational art forms. Cargo cultists are simply those of us unable to transcend the prevalent and deeply ingrained thought patterns of the times we live in, whether we from an isolated island in New Guinea, or a host to the equally isolated thought patterns of fundamentalist America. I believe artists, like Picasso, are those who are able to help others transcend the barriers of our own makings.
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