Clockwork Muse

by Colin Martindale

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465011861
• ISBN13: 9780465011865
• Release Date: November 1990
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 411 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A thought-provoking, challenging work of empirical aesthetics

Martindale's study of progress in the humanities should have spawned an entire field in experimental aesthetics, but his playfully combative attitude toward academic studies in the humanities resulted in a closed-minded failure to pay attention on the part of the humanities professionals to whom his work should have mattered most. Without telling the reader as much, to execute his methodology he makes use of a branch of computer science called "natural language processing." Using computers, he performs empirical studies on works in virtually every area of aesthetic productions. And he finds, across every such field, genre and sub-genre, variations on the same iron-clad laws: the progress of art, driven by the human tendency to habituate rapidly, is pushed toward higher and higher levels of "arousal potential," which is achieved either through "conceptual elaboration," which means stylistic change, or by increasing "primordial content," which is reflected in the progressively greater and greater retreat into the id, the loosening of associations giving rise to increasing incongruity of content within the elaboration of a given style. When primordial content goes up so high that no further loosening of associations is possible without losing coherence entirely, stylistic change comes to the rescue, and then primordial content can go back down for the time being within the new style. Another way of saying this is that there are periods of experimentation with form (i.e., conceptual elaboration) and periods of experimentation with content within a given form (i.e., primordial content). Humanities professionals (as reflected in the "official reviews" posted here) have criticized the book as being a long, repetitive expostulation of a perfectly obvious thesis: novelty drives artistic change. However, they need only realize that there have been many competing ideas about what drives artistic change, for instance, that it is driven by historical factors, by economics (Marx), by other ideas prevalent in society at the time or by change in the other arts. Martindale demonstrates that aesthetic change proceeds essentially autonomously, according to its own laws and at its own predictable pace. This is a profound contribution. Martindale also demonstrates that, over time, the need to increase arousal potential has driven artists to more and more unintuitive ways of expressing themselves, resulting in a distancing of art from common understanding, thus empirically confirming Harold Bloom's thesis that art is doomed on account of its own past strength, to use a Bloomian formulation. What Bloom merely saw as an insightful critic, Martindale demonstrates empirically. For anyone interested in how art progresses, the book is indispensable, even if Martindale's demonstration of the applicability of the laws he discovers to one discipline after another does become somewhat of a bookkeeping exercise after awhile, and his analysis is not without it

A very interesting work

It might perhaps be difficult to think of something called "progress" as occurring in the arts. Works of art are to be contemplated for their own sake, and taste, subjective as it is, is supposed to govern the evaluation of art. Along these same lines, the appreciation of new forms or works of art may be highly variable from person to person, but it is probably fair to say, even without comprehensive statistical analysis, that originality or novelty in art is always welcomed by art lovers, and that as time wears on, these new works are gradually taken for granted. It then takes a new collection of works to grab one's attention, to effectively knock the art lovers out of their aesthetic equilibrium. The author of this book proposes a quantitative theory of how artworks evolve that has as its central thesis that artists are driven to produce novel works as their main goal. It is a highly interesting book, and one that might be given even greater support using more contemporary evidence. For example it would be a fascinating and possibly very fruitful project to connect the author's results with what is known in cognitive neuroscience. Of utmost importance for the author's thesis is the concept of `primordial cognition.' According to the author, this is a mode of cognition that is to be differentiated from the `conceptual' mode of cognition. The latter cannot produce novel ideas the author argues, but is directed towards analysis and discrimination. Primordial cognition, on the other hand, is `free-associative', irrational, and undirected, and when one engages in it this will increase the likelihood that novel combinations of mental elements will be generated. Therefore it is the primary method for producing creative works of art. The author is careful to note however that primordial cognition is not enough to produce innovative ideas. One will also require a large quantity of diverse `mental elements.' The main contribution that the author makes in this book is the construction of mathematical models that detect the degree of primordial cognition in an artist's work. It is the pressure to create novel works that drives the artist he argues, and to prove this he must examine various historical epochs with the goal of understanding to what degree poets, artists, and musicians made breaks with the styles or genres that came before them. His thesis, which he designates as a `psychological theory of aesthetic evolution', is an interesting one, and is a formidable undertaking considering the subjective nature of evaluating whether a work of art is novel. If a work of art is new, then it must induce feelings of excitement or elation on the part of the spectator. The author refers to this as the `arousal potential' of the work, and it can be measured according to its novelty, complexity, or variability. These measures should increase monotonically over time, he argues, if his thesis is valid. Primordial content should increase over long periods of time

A statistical approach to stylistic change in art

Colin Martindale approaches the question of what drives artistic change (using the term in the broadest sense possible) by focusing on elements of art that can be quantified and analyzed statistically. He focuses on two variables -- arousal potential and primordial content -- and gives impressive evidence that genres as diverse as pop music, French poetry, Gothic architecture, and Italian paintings evolve in similar ways with respect to these variables. Through this approach, the author gives a unique and important contribution to our understanding of how styles change over time.Briefly, arousal potential is a measure of how stimulating a work of art is, and includes elements such as novelty, incongruity, intensity and surprise. Arousal potential increases over time within a given artistic genre. Primordial content is a little more difficult to define and to grasp, but it is a measure of how much mental regression the artist goes through while creating new art, and includes elements such as free association and a loosening of previous rules. He found that primordial thought content increases at the founding of a new style, and decreases over time within the style.I can understand that this approach to analysis of art would turn off many contemporary art critics because 1) It can be threatening to think that analysis of art can be approached so dispassionately and that artistic change is predictable. Perhaps there is concern that this trivializes art. 2) This approach is novel and goes against traditional approaches, by instead of looking at the details looking at broadest trends. Many people, fairly, are not interested in the big questions of artistic change, although they very well may be interested in one particular artist or another. 3) Most who are trained in the humanities are not equipped to perform similar analysis, and could well feel threatened by such a powerful, broad-based, generalizable, technical approach, especially by an "outsider."Overall, I rate the book as excellent, and heartily recommend it to anyone who cares about the theoretical aspects of artistic change.