by Herbert Harris
What gives art its power? There are as many answers as there are powerful works of art, but most seem to fall into a few broad categories. A great deal of art is representational. It is intended to depict or show us something, whether natural or abstract. It succeeds by faithfully capturing its subject. Other art may be intended to express an inner state, feeling, intuition, or vision. In both cases, the creative act is a one-sided process of mimesis or self-expression. Appreciation of the artwork is also somewhat unidirectional. What does this show me? How does it make me feel?
Authenticity of expression and fidelity of representation are important aspects of art’s power, but neither can explain the uncanny phenomenon that occurs when a work seems to look back at the viewer, drawing them into a relationship with it. What happens is more than the recognition of a represented object or an expressed feeling. It is a mutual recognition mediated by the painting, poem, or musical composition in an intersubjective space co-created by the artist, the viewer, and their shared culture.
The neuroscience of active inference proposes that the mind meets the world not directly but through a guessing game. The brain builds models of reality, predictions, and structured hunches, and tests them against incoming experience, updating them when they don’t fit. You don’t see the world as it is. You see your best guess, corrected in real time.
This works beautifully for the world out there. But how does a guessing machine guess about itself? Try to model your own consciousness, and you hit a strange loop: the modeler is the thing being modeled.
Since Hegel, philosophers have argued that self-consciousness depends on recognition. The self becomes itself not by staring inward, but by encountering itself in another’s response.
Nature’s solution is elegant and inescapably social. Read more »
The first time I became aware of Friedrich, many years ago, I was in Zurich to meet an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst—my head stuffed with theoretical questions and eerie dreams with soundtracks by Scriabin. Walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, I passed a bookstore window displaying a stunning art book with the elegant title Traum und Wahrheit (Dream and Truth) and a simple subtitle: Deutsche Romantik. I didn’t yet speak German, but I knew enough to be interested. The book was too heavy for my luggage. I bought it anyway and had it shipped.
What lured my eye to the cover as I passed by was a partial view from one of my now favorite Friedrich paintings, Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure)—a cool marshy landscape evoking real ones I would later see from train windows. How could just a corner of a painting have such power? It was the light, the late afternoon saturation of yellow, the black shadowed trees, and the hint of evening gloom already visible as gray on the horizon even though the sky above was still blue. I was captivated.
One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn metaphor for a certain kind of cause-and-effect, in which the effect part just keeps going and going. This metaphor is a perfect fit for one of the worst allisions in US maritime history, leading to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the container ship MV Dali on the morning of March 26, 2024.
Consider again the wooden desk. It was once part of a tree, like the ones outside your window. It became a bit of furniture though a long process of growth, cutting, shaping buying and selling until it got to you. You sit before it as it has a use – a use value – but it was made, not to give you a platform for your coffee or laptop, but in order to make a profit: it has an exchange value, and so had a price. It is a commodity, the product of an entire economic system, capitalism, that got it to you. Someone laboured to make it and someone else, probably, profited by its sale. It has a history, a backstory.
All of this is the case, but none of it simply appears to the senses. Capitalism itself isn’t a thing, but that doesn’t make it less real. The idea that all that there really is amounts to things you can bump into or drop on your foot is the ‘common sense’ that operates as the ideology of everyday life: “this is your world and these are the facts”. But really, nothing is like that: there are no isolated facts, but rather a complex, twisted web of mediations: connections and negations that transform over time.
A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. 
