Big question! Beginning, a little philosophical pharynx-clearing: I don't believe that modern/contemporary fine art is as radical a break with the past as it likes to recollect. I had an art professor in college argue that, really, all abstract art is representational, and all representational art is abstruse. Any abstract fine art has to refer to item sensory impressions that the artist has had, because there's goose egg else we have to draw on for material. No matter how crazy the fine art is, nosotros can't help but look for signs of the physical world in it. Meanwhile, even the well-nigh photorealist painting is still abstruse. You'd never be fooled by a painting into thinking you were looking out a window. Ultimately, it's just static blobs of color on a flat surface; you accept to do quite a flake of interpretive work to exist "convinced" past the illusion.

High modernism may have been a break with bookish practice in western Europe and America at the finish of the 19th century. Just symbolized, abstracted images of the body are as old as humanity. Among the very oldest known man artifacts are fertility figurines that abstract the female person form as radically as Brancusi. There are twoscore thousand year one-time cave paintings that represent people and animals in a way not noticeably different from Picasso. The European and American modernists didn't then much invent annihilation new as rediscover aboriginal methods of representing the body less literally. Every globe culture has its ain symbolic and stylized ways to correspond the torso; to refer to "art" every bit "the stuff in museums in the industrialized earth" is to miss most of what's going on out there.

There are two big forces that have changed our view of the human grade in the past half-century: biological science and computer simulation. When my parents were built-in, the structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid was hypothesized, but not even so known. Our knowledge of our bodies' workings extend all the way downwardly to the molecular level, and while that knowledge is still partial, it grows constantly and quickly. At this betoken, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that humans are profoundly different from any other large mammal, or that any supernatural or magical caption is necessary to explain why nosotros are how we are and how we got this way.

Simplified tree of life

Nosotros know that the only difference betwixt living and not-living things is in the fashion the free energy flows and the molecules combine. Nosotros know that the brain is just some other organ like the pancreas or liver, more complex in its physical structure possibly, but non possessed of any separate magical essence. We know that the cells in "our" bodies are outnumbered x to one by symbiotic and parasitic microbes. And we know that the earth is vastly larger and vastly older than our ancestors could accept conceived.

Microworld

I've noticed that my interest in art in the galleries has fallen off precipitously every bit I spend more time studying biology. Only to understand the mundane activities of your cells takes enormous visualization and imaginative skills. I find that an 60 minutes in the Museum of Natural History or an aquarium has more than aesthetic excitement than everything in the Met and the MoMA put together. I follow scientific illustration and astronomy Tumblrs that make the art blogs seem tediously shallow and irrelevant. The artists who I really adore are the ones who, rather than climbing ever deeper into their own navels, endeavor to engage with all of the new and counterintuitive knowledge inundating us, endeavour to organize it into forms that are intelligible to our senses, that can make emotional sense out of the uncaring world we live in.

Computers have been the other large change for representations of the trunk. Video game avatars are much like the animist religions' views of nature spirits — they're called "sprites" for a reason. The human relationship between game characters and nature spirits is virtually clear in Japanese games, where animism is withal very much alive. The mushrooms and turtles in Super Mario Bros come straight out of Shinto folklore. Ascribing humanoid attributes and motivations to computer processes is a remarkably strange affair to do, when you call back nigh information technology. Even my informatics professor unconsciously personifies algorithms when she explains them to u.s..

Pac-man

We represent ourselves on the screen every bit mouse pointers, every bit pixelated plumbers, as all kinds of fantastical monsters and aliens, even equally a rectangular blinking cursor. A segment of the nerd population yearns for the twenty-four hours when we tin can just upload our consciousness onto the cyberspace and leave the meatbags backside once and for all. I doubtfulness they'll get their wish, but there's no uncertainty that the computer is intertwining itself with our minds and bodies more deeply. What this means for our representations of ourselves to ourselves remains to be seen, but information technology's going to be something major.

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