Max Rempel, Ph.D.

4. Art

Because our life is short, and because of the lack of telepathic and psychic abilities, we have a strong urge for friendship, love, spirituality and a connection to god. Since our life is short, we have an urge to create art that will outlive the artist. Since there is much beauty in our life, our art reflects that. We are artistic; art makes our challenging life more fun.

The art here is as diverse as the people, that is, very diverse. The traditional forms of art, in a wide sense, include painting, sculpture, music, dancing, literature, poetry, songs, theater, architecture, fashion design, cooking and more. More recent are artistic photography and cinematography. Computer games and virtual reality design are an emerging form of art.

In general, you may find it difficult to relate to many forms of our art since many of them are built upon human realities which may be unfamiliar to you. For example, many modern civilized humans find an old art of Spanish-style bullfighting disgusting. In bullfighting, a human individual fights with a bull and one of them usually kills another. This form of entertainment still exists in Spain, but many humans would avoid enjoying it. Similarly, you may dismiss a part of human art because immersing in it may make you too sad. Such are for example visual art and literature focused on war, crime and death. You may also find our religious art and literature a bit naive.

The main component of art is evidence miracle; that is, it has to be close to impossible, highly improbable to produce without inspiration and a high concentration of artistic talent. To judge whether the creation of art involved a miracle, you would need to have an idea of what the norms are, what is commonplace and what is very improbable. In other words, you need to know our realities pretty well to understand some of our art.

For example, many thousands of artists created a great many paintings every year. Then came a point in time when Impressionists introduced a radically new way of painting and expressing their emotions in paintings. This was very unusual for the time and became much respected as a breakthrough in art.

Many painters have a style of their own. To know that their style is unique and ingenious, one must be educated about the norms of painting. Only by knowing the baseline, can one value human art the way humans do.

A substantial component of uniqueness and ingeniousness is a miracle; that is, an extremely low probability of repeating the creation of such art or developing the unique artist's style. Knowing the baseline probabilities and frequency distributions, one then can estimate the chances of each new art creation or art style to appear by chance. When art creation or art style emerges which is very improbable, the humans value it much and regard this as a creation of art and ingenuity.

Another key component of art is beauty. This is also very much relative. One has to understand what is ordinary in human society to judge what is extraordinary.

One of the most beautiful forms of art is landscapes. A human could judge the weather, even the smell of the captured nature just by looking at a landscape painting. A grey-pink sky with some violet will tell us that it is a sunset and the shape of clouds may tell us that this is a warm summer evening. The name of the artist may allow us to guess where the painting was painted and coordinate the spirit of the drawing with the historical period. By colors and strokes, we may even deduce the emotion of the painter at the time of the painting's creation. All this together, reconstructed from nuances would create a unique experience of enjoying the art.

Some of you may not be able to value human art because of a lack of reference information. And many of you may find it painful immersing in a human way of thinking and living which is induced by the works of art.

Nonetheless some art you may appreciate, especially if you have the ability to feel the emotion of art psychically.

For example, you may enjoy our music. Check out classical guitar, classical organ and symphonic music. These forms of art survived many generations and fashions and are among the most universal of our arts.

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Max Rempel, Ph.D. | San Diego, CA | max@maxrempel.com