On The Origin of Art

Résumé

The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania (often called, ever since its opening five years ago, the most interesting new art museum for decades, or simply the most interesting art museum in the world; its average visitor time is longer than for any other art museum, including the Louvre) has just opened an unusual new exhibition, On the Origin of Art. Four “scientists” (I was given that honorific label), psychologists Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Miller, neuroscientist Mark Changizi and I, were invited to co-curate: to offer our own evolutionary hypotheses for the origin of art and to select works that illustrated our hypotheses and challenged those of our co-curators. I will give an introduction and overview of the exhibition and the hypotheses, and an explanation for some of my choices. If there is time, I may also say a little about the way art and science can work together. I selected for my show with one artist who frequently works with (real) scientists, inviting him to contribute photographs of pollen, photographed through electron microscopes, gathered for him around Mona; I am collaborating with another artist-photographer, two of whose work I slected for the exhibition, on a future series of shows involving photographs of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly catches, also at microscopic scale; and I contributed a kind of art-work myself, an interactive iPad “verbeogame” that invites visitors to detect the kinds of patterns Shakespeare has hidden in his sonnets