art and the visual stystem

Continuing my summary of the literature in the field, the following outlines a hugely relevant article by Zeki and Lamb that proposes the idea that artists are in essence conducting research on the brain via their aesthetic choices.

Zeki, S. & Lamb, M. (1994). The neurology of kinetic art, Brain, 117, 607-636.
Zeki and Lamb postulated three “laws” supporting their credo that “All art must obey the laws of the visual system” (p. 607). The first law emphasizes the role of the cortex as opposed to the eye in processing certain elements of visual information. Where it was once believed that images were received in the brain fully formed, we now understand that our visual reality is in many was constructed in the cortex. The second law notes that the visual cortex is divided into “geographically separate parts” that are divided into functional specializations. Thus while our visual reality represents a “coherent picture’ (p. 607), this reality is assembled by different parts of the visual cortex each specialized for processing elements of a visual scene. The third law notes that these functional and geographic individuations reveal what tasks” have primacy” in vision” (p. 607). Thus, the structural and functional organization of “colour, form, motion and, possibly, depth” (p. 607) processing indicate their dominance in the visual system.

While Zeki and Lamb noted that “Aesthetics must involve a great deal more than the
stimulation of specific visual areas” (p. 607) they propose the idea that artists are have via their emphasis on different elements and qualities of their visual work, “almost certainly unknowingly, tried to obtain aesthetic effects by stimulating optimally only a limited number of visual areas in the cerebral cortex” (p. 607). Utilizing motion, for example, they propose the idea that art that explores motion and/or evokes the aesthetic response of perceived movement, undoubtedly achieves this effect via the emphasis and de-emphasis of the differentiated properties of the visual system.
“Implicit in our view is the more general supposition that, when executing a work ofart, the artist unknowingly undertakes an experiment to study the organization of the visual brain” (p. 608). Thus aesthetic responses of a work are linked to the ability of the artist to evoke responses from the brain. This is not to imply that these aesthetic responses are exclusively related to the different specialized areas of the visual system, but rather that the aesthetic hierarchy of a piece of art (in a sense what the image is about or evokes, particularly in the world of nonobjective art in which content may be communicated non-objectively) is likely reflected in the ability to target and therefore evoke the involvement of the functional specialization of the visual system.