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Anyone who has experienced art has asked: what is art? Does it have limits?

We can use concepts we've discussed so far in the neurosciences, to explain this core human need and how it infuses in us an existential and cultural perspective. By examining art's effects on us, we can understand how our mind "observes" (and so often doesn't), how sensory stimuli we call art can create internal dynamic complexity, and how this complexity then slowly distills itself into a cognitive-emotional experience - we feel either moved or unmoved by the art piece.

When and where does Art "touch" us:
○ Is art a product of or reflection of our mind?
○ Is art supposed to move us to ecstasy, or at last a happy place?
○ When an art piece "moves" us, what happens within us, what "moves"?
○ Does art need to be beautiful, synthetic, recognizable, or true to life?
○ Can it be grotesque, distressing, even disgusting? Should it ever be?
○ If we don't "feel" an art piece, does it suggest something about the artist?

Art may be described as a culture-imbued communication, mostly emotional, mostly subconscious, and sometimes ambiguous. It uses shared symbols not from any formal language but from society & our human-ness, a result of our neuro-evolutionary inheritance. It is part of our natural sense to express, when our mind feels a tickle. Master artists feel compelled by inner forces, becoming alchemists smelting exquisiteness. Their masterful art creates passions in everyone, and especially euphoria in art connoisseurs who then seek ever-newer highs. What's obvious: Art evokes passion & Passion evokes art.

So maybe "good art" is simply a brew, composed by balancing a few of these "spirits & flavors"... letting them seep on the canvas of our unconscious:
• Passions: love, lust, anger, disgust, melancholy, fear, delight
• Sense of serene calmness
• earlier/evolutionary Memories
• A core thought/theme
• Conflict/Confusion
• Permanence/Impermanence

We will explore art's place & resonance in our mind, using mostly static visual forms (paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations).

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Welcome to the series "Comprehensivist Wednesdays". Transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and Polymathy are some of the ways of describing this approach which Buckminster Fuller called Comprehensivity and described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive”.

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