What do you think is beautiful? If beauty isn’t all that matters, it is surely something valuable that you want in your own economy. We often achieve new insights into beauty by trying on the aesthetic perspectives of other people. So let’s start with one such person and then consider the lessons for our own lives.
Kiriana Cowansage, a neuroscientist in her midtwenties, is considered a very attractive and enthusiastic young woman. Her biggest enthusiasm, at least professionally, is science. She has been deeply interested in science and science-related themes since the age of four and now she is earning a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the biochemical basis for individual differences in fear expression.
My interest is not in Kiriana’s science but rather in her approach to aesthetics—questions about what we find beautiful, compelling, or otherwise stimulating in a deep and fundamental way. People so often disagree about aesthetics, but Kiriana’s thoughts have helped me understand why these clashes of opinion are so persistent and so hard to adjudicate through rational discussion. It also has helped me see how much hidden beauty we can find in today’s world. When it comes to appreciating beauty, differences in cognition can be fundamental and if we pursue this insight consistently we will be led down some surprising paths.
In an email Kiriana wrote to me: “I’m very visually oriented, and in both literature and art, I prefer work that depicts (or evokes) realistic, concrete, high-contrast images.” On fiction, Kiriana noticed: “I almost always choose plot-driven books that evoke strong, distinct, believable mental images over those that are blurry, fantastical or character-driven.” Kiriana explains these tastes as, in part, driven by a need for strong stimuli.
A portrait of Kiriana in Psychology Today discussed some of her literary tastes, while describing her in terms of Asperger’s syndrome. It was that article that first drew my attention to Kiriana. That piece quoted her, somewhat misleadingly, as follows:
“I was partly drawn to [stories of] serial killers because of my interest in patterns, logical induction, and puzzle solving,” she remembers. “These twisted individuals took puzzles to a whole new level of interest.” Captivated by the process of piecing together an event based on its physical trace, she fell asleep each night trying to come up with the “perfect crime,” one that could not be reconstructed.
The article caricatured Kiriana and her aesthetic emotions through an overly garish lens. It quoted her as follows: “All my obsessions related to something profoundly catastrophic…I have a really hard time feeling emotionally aroused. Brutal, violent, scary things were interesting to me because that was the best way to feel something.” The article continued, “Her repeated readings of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho soon surpassed those of The Wonderful World of Prehistoric Animals.”
Rather than viewing Kiriana as someone who is different and thus weird, I am more inclined to understand her as an individual whose cognition gives her special insight into aesthetics. After I read the Psychology Today article, I followed up with a query and Kiriana offered some explanation, revealing a more subtle picture of her tastes: “I also like art that is detail-oriented like [Edward] Gorey, who uses subtle features to cast a sinister, unnerving veil over bleak or banal snapshots. I find it interesting to mentally extract the elements that make his drawings effective. I’m similarly fascinated by Escher.”
When I queried her about violence in art, Kiriana’s response indicated the article was off base: “It doesn’t need to be violent, it’s just that violence is often portrayed with a graphical candor or bluntness that I find appealing.” She says it is the realism and the puzzles of “slasher” novels that she likes, not necessarily the gore. I would add that a preference for violence and catastrophe in art is common, as evidenced by any James Bond movie or by Shakespeare’s King Lear. Kiriana’s description of her artistic tastes, and the need to be emotionally aroused, was not meant as a broader statement about the quality of her life.
From this short episode we can read off two lessons about cognition and taste. First, if we see a difference in taste we should wonder where it comes from and try to understand it, not frame it as weird. Neurology does matter for our taste in art, music, and books. The connection between neurology and taste is often easiest to detect in individuals with extreme and specialized cognitive profiles; that makes those individuals valuable beacons for spotting new insights into beauty.
We should drop many of our presuppositions about “low-quality” or “depraved” artistic tastes. When people have tastes that are different from ours, maybe they are perceiving and experiencing something that we do not. Or maybe they are not blinded by something filling our eyes and ears or by our automatic cognitive “editors.”
By the way, it’s not the case that all or even most people on the autism spectrum “like the same things.” All human beings, including those on the autism spectrum, have areas of lesser or greater sensitivity to particular kinds of stimuli. For instance Kiriana does not always want a stronger or more brutal sensation. She reports that other times her tastes show an extreme sensitivity or aversion to some kinds of stimuli. She cannot stand bitter tastes in food and drink and for that reason she has a strong dislike of coffee. When she walks down the street she finds the noise and the sounds disturbing, so she often wears headphones to keep out or regulate those noises. The more insightful portrait of her aesthetic sense is that of a person who has unusual sensitivities to (some) aesthetic stimuli and thus unusual insights into aesthetics.
Unusual variations in perceptual abilities, as is found in autistics, lead to unusual patterns of consumption and, relative to non-autistics, greater specialization in consumption, including cultural consumption. It’s easier for an autistic to receive steady or even increasing returns from a single aesthetic pursuit, if only because the autistic can notice so many small details and order the observed information so powerfully. More generally, if a person is especially good at enjoying music but below average at enjoying stories, he won’t consume the typical (non-autistic) bundle of music and stories. He’ll prefer more music and fewer stories and thus his patterns of cultural consumption will appear atypical.
The general tendency in the economics of culture, and also in the sociology of culture, is to look to education and social status for clues about what books, movies, music, etc. people will like and dislike. People who belong to expensive country clubs may be reluctant to indulge or even develop a taste for professional wrestling, a relatively low-status genre among their peers. Or people will buy expensive books to put on their coffee table, even if they never read them. The classic statement of this approach comes in Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction, published in 1984, which looks at the connection between culture and social stratification in postwar France. Bourdieu’s work is useful, but sociology can explain only so much of cultural consumption. The diverse neurologies of individual human beings drive much of the diversity behind the rich cultural menu available today.
The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume understood the importance of the individuality of perception for our understanding of beauty. In his famous 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume (drawing upon John Locke and others) argued that many aesthetic disagreements stem from our differing abilities to perceive fine distinctions. For instance some people can sense a small change in a flavor and others cannot. In prescient fashion, Hume suggests that too fine an ability to perceive (again, he gives the example of tasting food) can be as much a burden as a blessing. This notion of delicacy of taste, or lack thereof, was a common theme in eighteenth-century writings on aesthetics, although it was not tied to much of an understanding of human neurology.
I’ve noticed that many art lovers are reluctant to “reduce” aesthetic preferences to neurology, because they feel something uniquely mysterious or something human is lost when we think too hard about the underlying science. The invocation of neurology somehow communicates a sense of cold determinism and a beauty that is distant at best. But rest assured, with or without neurology the mysteries of art largely remain. In fact a look at art through the lens of neurology can open our eyes to greater artistic mysteries and additional founts of creativity. Neurological approaches to understanding art, compared to sociological approaches, are more likely to imply art is fun and they are more likely to imply that artistic pleasures are deeply and fundamentally human.
Our particular neurology doesn’t lock us into a particular set of artistic tastes. Individuals can learn to appreciate the cognitive skills and also the aesthetic perspectives of others, but first they need to know something is there to be appreciated. They need to know that strange and different kinds of music are not just a lot of phoney baloney. Sociological approaches to cultural taste often imply that taste differences are contrived, artificial, or reflect wasteful status-seeking. The result is that we appreciate taste differences less than we might and we become less curious. Neurological approaches imply that different individuals perceive different cultural mysteries and beauties. You can’t always cross the gap to understand the other person’s point of view, but at the very least you know something is there worth pursuing.
Writing as an admirer of Hume on many issues, including the neurological foundations of taste, I’d like to challenge you with some conundrums on beauty and excitement, first involving music.
Our enjoyment of music, including classical music, depends fundamentally on how we perceive sounds, and that depends on our neurologies and also upon our previous listening histories. Consider the cases of people who, due to a stroke or brain injury, lose their ability to talk but not their ability to sing. Oliver Sacks, in his book Musicophilia, describes a man who was struck by lightning and was suddenly inspired to become a pianist (at age forty-two); “Williams syndrome” children, who are often hypermusical by nature; as well as people who find the sound of a symphony orchestra to resemble the sound of clashing pots and pans and a man who has a long-term memory primarily for music. These are exceptional cases but they illustrate the more general point—true for all human beings—that the appreciation of music depends upon individual neurologies.
We’re all reliant on our faculties to convert a Nina Simone song into a pleasurable or stimulating experience, or not. There is even a group of people with a condition known as amusia. These people don’t have any deficits of hearing or any signs of brain damage, yet they simply cannot find pleasure in music. In laboratory tests amusics, as they are called, cannot very well process pitch in a musical context and in this regard they have a cognitive disability. The best-known amusics in history are Che Guevara, Sigmund Freud, and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman. These individuals, despite their formidable intellectual strengths, never grasped the structure behind a musical scale. Amusics typically have less white matter in the right inferior frontal cortex and one explanation is that amusia follows from “impoverished communication in a right, or perhaps bilateral, temporo-frontal neural network.”
Temple Grandin, who is autistic, also reports that she is not moved by music, but most amusics are not autistic. For that matter, most autistics have good abilities to perceive emotional “affect” in music. If anything, autistics seem to have an especially intense preoccupation with music. These musical interests may stem from cognitive advantages. When it comes to laboratory tests, autistics have above-average pitch perception abilities, there is a disproportionately high subgroup of autistics with perfect pitch, and autistics have above-average abilities to disaggregate the particular tones in a musical chord. It is likely that these differences are not accidents but rather are indicators of other harder-to-measure cognitive advantages in appreciating music. So we shouldn’t be surprised if autistics often obsess over music or have unusual or highly specialized musical tastes.
If we are willing to use the prevailing language and standards of the scientific literature, it could be said that non-autistics have systematic cognitive deficits when it comes to music. “Being normal,” as that concept is sometimes bandied about, may in fact hinder one’s ability to love and appreciate music. I was intrigued by one study of this question; it found that 46 percent of those classified as having “perfect pitch” would score as “socially eccentric,” as compared to 15 percent of the control group.
Tim Page, a Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic (originally for The Washington Post; he now teaches at USC), has been diagnosed in terms of Asperger’s. He is another example of autistic strengths in music appreciation and he explains his relationship to music as follows: “‘Music was not something I had to learn about from middle C,’ Page said. ‘I knew about it intrinsically from the moment I heard it and needed to learn how to deal with that, how to put that together. There’s no doubt that it had something to do with [Asperger’s] because I was extraordinarily sensitive to music from the time I was two or three. After that, I just inhaled it.’”
Hikari Oe, one of Japan’s leading contemporary composers (and son of the Nobel-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe), is considered autistic. Oe does not see well, he has poor coordination, he cannot live on his own, and he doesn’t talk very much, but he is very good at composing. He has absolute perfect pitch as well as an incredible musical memory; he can recognize any of Mozart’s six-hundred-plus pieces from hearing just a few notes. His music, originally inspired by birdsong and by Mozart, has made him a celebrity in Japan and brought him several times to the top of the country’s classical charts. By the way, when Hikari Oe was born he had evident brain and other medical problems; Japanese doctors tried to convince his father to let him die but his father refused, and Hikari subsequently ended up serving as an inspiration for much of his father’s fiction.
Hikari Oe’s music is not very “sophisticated” by many contemporary standards but it has a directness, sweetness, and naturalness that resonate with millions of listeners. The music is accessible and if anything the core language comes from Mozart. Few contemporary composers could build upon Mozart’s style without affectation or excess self-consciousness. Maybe it’s because I know where it came from, but when I hear Oe’s music—which I enjoy—I think of the very direct manner in which many autistic people conduct their conversations.
Is Oe simply a beautiful composer? Or is he better thought of as an “autistic composer”?
One music critic, Jamie James, rebelled against the entire aesthetic behind the music. In full awareness of Oe’s autism, he wrote:
I hate this music…I find it completely suspect. It seems to me to have no emotional content at all. It’s like music written by a schizophrenic trying to imitate the emotional state of a well person, music that intends to be happy rather than expressing a real emotional state…There are no surprises here. And I hate the performance, too, it’s extremely metronomic, but I don’t know how else you could play this, and I don’t think any performance could change my mind about the music.
Maybe James is being excessively nasty or intolerant, but he does recognize that Oe offers a very distinct musical language and that the language is not for everyone. James is right that Oe’s music does sound very different, and it’s one more example of how aesthetic perspective depends on the neurology of the individual human mind.
OK, now let’s consider a perspective on music from yet another direction. Remember atonal music, that brilliant innovation that culminated in the twentieth century? What became of it? Well, it’s alive and well in the heads of many of the neurodiverse, and I mean “neurodiverse” in the broad sense of the term, not just to refer to the autism spectrum. That’s right, there are some people who love this music; I think many of them have different neurological programming and that is why they are so receptive to these unusual sounds.
When the atonal works of Schoenberg and Webern first appeared, many critics believed that after some time they would be embraced as popular music. Not popular in the Top 40 sense, but popular in the sense that Mahler, Elgar, and Debussy inspire musical love in many nonprofessional listeners. Mozart and Chopin were by no means universally accepted in their time; their music sounded strange and dissonant to a lot of people. So these critics posited that maybe we just needed the same adjustment process for atonal music and its spin-offs.
Of course this level of popularity has never come to pass and yet the original works of atonal music, serial music, and other innovations are now many decades old. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire song cycle premiered in 1912—almost one hundred years ago—and I don’t know anyone who holds out hope for its eventual cultural ascendancy.
If anything, many strands of contemporary music have become less listenable over time to the majority of music listeners. I know listeners who appreciate Schoenberg and Berg, or perhaps Messiaen, but they draw the line at Carter, Boulez, Babbitt, and Stockhausen, not to mention Helmut Lachenmann or James Tenney or David Tudor (some of my favorites). Sometimes these composers don’t produce much more than what—to others—would seem like a loud, screeching tone.
It’s not that the skeptics are indifferent to this music. Many people hate this music, or they would hate it if they had to hear it more often. They don’t hate it for cultural reasons, as some northeastern elites dislike county-and-western styles for their broader “red state” connotations, but rather they hate it because of the way it sounds. They hate how it hurts their ears and violates their aesthetic sensibilities. They hate its ugliness. The music comes across—to many people—as scratchy, disconnected, and moving from one obnoxious noise to another. Yet that’s exactly the same music that I sometimes use to relax if I’ve just had a strenuous time making small talk at a cocktail party.
Neither sociology nor aesthetic argument will solve this one, but maybe neurology will. I think of a lot of atonal music as music for the neurodiverse, and again I mean that word in the broad sense. Just as many people hate the sound of the music, there is no denying that many serious listeners—albeit a definite minority—find it compelling.
Why exactly might some people prefer atonal music and similar forms? One possibility is that many individuals use different methods of organizing sounds in a hierarchy and this leads them to prefer different musical and indeed sonic content. For instance if the perception of sound is more immediate and less regulated by top-down processes, some pure sounds will be hated and others will be enjoyed, depending on the details of neurology. Many autistics have strong dislikes of sirens, beeping sounds, the confusion of multiple voices, and “normal” levels of background noise. Other individuals (some of whom are autistic, but not mostly) have preferred sounds, as reflected in the diverse offerings available in music markets. A lot of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical music, starting with Varese and John Cage, blurs the distinction between music and the more general notion of sound; those musics appeal to subgroups that have special sonic likes and dislikes. One practical lesson is that “music as noise” is an entirely coherent aesthetic phenomenon, whether you find it in the contemporary classical composers or in a modern “noise band” such as Merzbow.
The studies of atonal music in the music cognition literature show that most people have trouble putting the music in a meaningful hierarchy. Atonal music tends to have less structure at the larger scales of sonic organization—at least in terms of orders that most people can enjoy—and so to unappreciative listeners it sounds like random noise. You won’t find traditional harmonies or hummable tunes. With additional listening to a piece, repeated motifs often become apparent, but they’re hard to find and they don’t satisfy most people in the way that the progressive elucidation of a Haydn motif does, much less a Buddy Holly song. So understanding or appreciating the structure of atonal music requires some special skills of pattern recognition. The atonal music fans may be better at some kinds of cognitive processing, and better at constructing some kinds of hierarchies from their sensory input, relative to typical listeners.
When viewed through this lens of neurology, many of the critical dialogues about contemporary music seem beside the point, as they don’t get at the real source of the difference of opinion. Diana Raffman, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay that surveys the cognitive difficulties behind appreciating atonal music and she concludes that it, as music, must not be an acceptable art form. The remarkable things about this essay are that she a) never considers neurodiversity across human beings, and b) never comes to terms with the fact that this music has some real fans. My working hypothesis is that, to put it bluntly, most of humanity has a cognitive disability when it comes to enjoying atonal music.
Part of the joy in atonal music and related forms is discovering the order and in the meantime enjoying the surprise of what is to come next. In atonal music the order is harder to find than usual and thus perhaps the music has an appeal a bit like that of solving a difficult crossword puzzle or breaking a cipher. But for that to be fun you have to face some prospect of actually breaking the code, albeit not too easily.
The idea of finding order in music may sound mechanical but it shouldn’t be so unfamiliar. Many people like to think of themselves as preferring emotion in music and not structure or order, but these qualities are closely connected. For most of us, finding the order in the music should be neither too easy nor too hard. That’s why we don’t listen to simple pop ditties too many times in a row; after a while the tune becomes expected and it no longer stimulates us in a pleasing manner or gives us enough emotion. In other words, the music doesn’t have a complex enough structure for most of us and hearing it is like doing a crossword puzzle we already have solved. It’s why tic-tac-toe isn’t a fun game for most of us.
An issue arises if you get “too good” at finding the order in music. You must resort to bigger and bigger doses of informational complexity to achieve the prior effects that were so enjoyable. It’s a bit like needing successively stronger doses of heroin, wanting to move beyond Vivaldi, or more prosaically having to switch from one pop song to the next. Don’t we all do that? But the metric for the right amount of complexity differs across listeners, even across listeners with the same degree of musical experience and education.
The kid who listens only to Top 40 might feel that your love for Mahler is overly intellectualized, when for you Mahler is joy and pathos. I swooned over the Beethoven symphonies as a youth but today that’s not enough for me. I get a visceral and electrifying surge from, say, a live performance by the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a microtonal noise band from rural Morocco that probably would hurt your ears. Live Indian classical music, especially of the percussive variety (Zakir Hussain is a special favorite) is for me also an emotionally ecstatic experience. Indian classical music, which does not rely so heavily on all-too-predictable harmonies, produces for me more excitement and raw emotion. Some people may need a more violent “feel” to their music, just as Kiriana Cowansage likes pictures and stories with lots of contrast and sharp relief. Atonal music, with its lack of traditional harmony and melody, often sounds brutal and discordant, as does the noise band from Morocco, and that is part of what I like about it.
I was curious and I asked Kiriana Cowansage what role music played in her life. Her answer, as you might expect, reflects the diversity of individual taste:
I listen to music—usually only one or two songs on repeat for a month or more. Then I spontaneously get bored and switch. Usually, for about a week after such a switch, the new song makes me feel loopy and euphoric—I can’t focus on any other activity—so I have to break in new songs for a period of time before I can use them as background. I have a similar reaction (face heating up, euphoria) to certain fast-paced rhythms and parts that crescendo or mount. In orchestral music, I like dark and rhythmic pieces, for example, Dance of the Knights. Despite this, I’ve never developed a real interest in music, beyond the listening part. I don’t follow any particular artists and I don’t have a favorite. In fact, I often can’t name the song that I’ve been listening to for a month. I seem to latch onto internal elements of a song without caring about it as a whole or the artist in general.
A lot of what we don’t like, in the arts, is simply creative forms that appeal to different and perhaps unusual neurologies. I am not saying that all people with unusual neurologies love atonal music or for that matter even know much about atonal music. It’s just that if I go to a concert of contemporary classical music—the scratchy kind—I expect to see people with rather specialized cognitive skills, including the ability to order sounds that can easily seem chaotic into a comprehensible hierarchy.
Atonal and serialist music represent further signs of the division of productive labor present in all economically advanced societies. The world has become so wealthy and so diverse that some composers make music that appeals to people only with a very particular and very refine sense of musical appreciation. That’s the best way to think about much of the music—and other art forms—that you may hate.
As with atonal music, the most common reaction is simply to evaluate the aesthetic perspective through the taste of either the public or the educated critics. We privilege those perspectives either because they have social status or because, in the case of the consumers, they have buying power and thus they command the attention of the media. So if it is serial killer stories, maybe the critics call it too lowbrow and talk about the decline of our society. If it is atonal music, it gets labeled as too inaccessible or too highbrow or it is claimed that the academic composers are perverse and self-indulgent. Most cultural criticism is staggering in how much it begs the question of what is the appropriate middle ground.
In the meantime, awareness of human neurodiversity helps us see the diversity of beauty in modern society, even if we cannot perceive all of those beauties. As cultural production becomes more diverse, more and more art forms will be directed at pleasing people with unusual neurologies. More and more of the aesthetic beauty of the world will be hidden to most observers, or at least those who don’t invest in learning. The aesthetic lushness of the world will be increasingly distributed into baroque nooks and crannies, in a manner that would honor a Borges short story.
It’s not usually put in such terms, but I think of art connoisseurship as a fundamental part of the profile of autistics. Go back to the list of the cognitive strengths of autism in chapter 2. Autistics have, on average, superior visual perception, a better-developed sense of pitch, superior abilities for pattern recognition, and superior abilities for spotting details in visual pictures, compared to non-autistics. Yet, as discussed in chapter 6, autistics may be less skilled at enjoying some kinds of fictional narrative.
Dr. Hans Asperger saw the aesthetic side of autistics clearly. He wrote:
Another distinctive trait one finds in some autistic children is a rare maturity of taste in art. Normal children have no time for more sophisticated art. Their taste is usually for the pretty picture, with kitschy rose pink and sky blue…Autistic children, on the other hand, can have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding, being able to distinguish between art and kitsch with great confidence. They may have a special understanding of works of art which are difficult even for many adults, for instance Romanesque sculpture or paintings by Rembrandt. Autistic individuals can judge accurately the events represented in the picture, as well as what lies behind them, including the character of the people represented and the mood that pervades a painting. Consider that many normal adults never reach this mature degree of art appreciation.
As I discussed in chapter 5, autistics often do not need cultural canons to appreciate aesthetic qualities in objects or artworks. Remember Sue Rubin and her appreciation for plastic spoons and running water? Hugo Lamoureux, a Canadian autistic, reports that watching the snow removal equipment in Quebec is for him a highly enjoyable endeavor. There is no full or satisfactory account of what autistics are doing when they focus on favored objects in such a manner. But in part autistics seem to be appreciating some aesthetic qualities of these objects, without the intermediation of what non-autistics would normally call works of art. The autistics are cutting through to the underlying beauties of form, color, texture, and so on without requiring a mainstream, socially constructed context in between themselves and those qualities of interest. These autistics live in a joyous and plentiful artistic world, but because their enjoyment relies less on social intermediation and formal canons of taste and interpretation, that enjoyment is harder for others to perceive.
The gap here is not a simple one of “autistics vs. non-autistics.” Remember there is a great deal of variety of perceptual skills across autistics. For that reason, if no other, each autistic is likely to focus on varying objects for his or her aesthetic preferences. The preferences of one autistic will not necessarily be intelligible, in specific terms, to the understanding of another autistic. For that reason there is not an “autistic cultural canon” to stand alongside the non-autistic cultural canons. The lack of such a canon may look like a weakness but it also can be viewed as a strength: Aesthetic appreciation through the lens of a canon is optional for autistics. Maybe a cultural canon is a kind of perceptual crutch, or a device for framing, which many autistics simply don’t need. As I’ve mentioned, the autistics are in this regard closer to some ideas in Buddhism; they can see the beauty of the universe in very small or very particular objects.
You may recall Arthur Danto’s famous essay on why Andy Warhol’s Brillo box is art when a normal Brillo box, before Warhol, was never considered art. The box is more or less the same. Danto’s answer, in a nutshell, was that art must be defined in an appropriate social context and historical understanding. The earlier Brillo box—before Warhol—lacked this complementary understanding. But Danto is never clear on how large a social “art world” is needed to create this context. Do we need a large nation? A midsized nation? A small group of art critics? What if Warhol’s Brillo boxes are understood as art only in Iceland, population 300,000 or so? What if the relevant understanding is held in the mind of only a single individual? You can see where this is headed: Create your own inner prosperity.
If autistics have greater direct and independent access to the aesthetic qualities of objects, they are less reliant on the traditional artistic paths toward accessing beauty and wonder. It seems that for many autistics art is more powerful but also more optional at the same time. That’s an unusual and indeed, for many of us, counterintuitive combination.
That said, this counterintuitive combination should be increasingly familiar to us, albeit through a different mode of access, namely technology rather than cognition rooted in neurology. Recall from chapter 3 that many of us, through web technology, are replacing traditional artistic masterworks with our personal blends of self-assembled small cultural bits. The iPhone and its outputs have surpassed the classic masterworks as a representation of where culture is at today. Masterworks, such as Caravaggio paintings, are more accessible than ever before and it is easier to learn about them and learn to love them too. That makes masterworks more powerful, at least for those who care. At the same time, not everyone needs Caravaggio. If you don’t look at his paintings, or if you don’t experience other classic parts of the Western canon, your self-assembled aesthetic life still can be a rich one. For most of us it can be said that art is now becoming more powerful but also more optional at the same time.
And that makes the world more beautiful.