The Arts as Ways of Creating and Conveying Knowledge

Guillermo del Toro, the man behind Pan's Labyrinth, said recently that his pictures were more about theme than about character development or story; that the images on the screen (presumably with the sound track) can convey information about the characters in the film that would have required alternative dramatic techniques on the stage or in a book.

Paul Simon, the song writer and singer, said recently that occasionally, as when he found the key melodic line for Bridge over Troubled Waters, he feels as if he is the agent of something flowing through himself; that the product is so different from his usual that it seems to come from a place he does not know. He described a complex process starting with the rhythm, then to the melody, to the harmonic structure, to the words, to develop a complete piece. He described that creative process to be in some way comparable to the process by which a painter creates his art, or a scientist his products. He supposes that each has a comparable feeling on accomplishing a new creation.

Of course there is craft knowledge -- how to compose a symphony or a song, how to make a painting or sculpture, how to write a novel or perform a play or film. All this knowledge is important, and all of it has been the subject of much study, codified in books and training programs for practioners. But that is not the knowledge about which I wish to write now.

Nor am I talking about the use of arts in the support of science and technology; although I do think sometimes that scientific illustration rises to the level of art as in the case of Audubon's illustrations of birds. Indeed, many scientific illustrators seem to me to draw heavily on the crafts of the visual artists to produce images that are quite beautiful. Is their work less art because it conveys scientific information than was the painting of renaissance artists who conveyed religious information?

While science and technology writing is often so limited by the conventions of professional journals as to be anything but artistic, books by social scientists do seem to be rise to the level of literature in some cases. Think of the work of anthropologists for example, describing traditional cultures. Popular science or popular technology, describing these fields for a general audience, seems also sometimes to rise to the level of genre literature.

This blog has focused on science and technology, and the creation, sharing and dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge. I wish in retrospect that I had focused more on art and literature as vehicles for knowledge creation and sharing.

It seems to me quite obvious that can we learn from literature and drama, and thus that they convey information which we can turn into knowledge. Indeed, I think critical review and audience acceptance, especially over historical time, provide systems to validate the knowledge contained in these arts. Would Shakespeare have remained popular for five centuries had the plays not seemed to convey some deep truths? In some cases, these arts can convey rather descriptive information, as in the cases of historical plays and novels, which we could alternatively find from narrative historical works. In other cases, the arts help us to understand how people are and how they behave, teaching by example; the knowledge orten tacit rather than explicit.

So too, the visual arts have been for centuries a means for informing the viewer. They tell us how people, places and things look that we have never seen. They can also tell stories, as was done by the church muralists in the Middle Ages to instruct and inform the illiterate public of the time. As the expressionists so clearly taught us, paintings can convey information about the emotional import of something as well as about its actual appearance. Photography, in the hands of artists, has taught us about seeing in the instant that to which we in the past failed to attend.

I think too, that the creation of art can be an act of discovery. The novelist can produce a book that will express knowledge that he/she can convey in no other way, discovering things about the world and him/herself in the process. Indeed, there can be a social construction of knowledge in the process, as editor(s) and writer(s) collaborate, critics clarify, and readers discuss a novel. I must suppose that Shakespeare learned about the world in creating the plays, and that hundreds of millions of people have learned from the elaboration of those plays by thousands of directors and actors, not to mention critics and scholars who analyzed the plays, and teachers who taught them in the classroom (and via the media). I suppose that what a modern audience learns from Shakespeare is in many ways different than what an Elizabethan audience would have learned, if only because our culture has been changed by Shakespeare, internalizing knowledge within the culture itself.