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TODAY Monday 5 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Monday 5 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Mediocre Landscapes and Hope for the Planet
The cover on yesterday's New York Times Book Review features a picture of a blue lake bound by Appalachian-height hills. Light pours from a bright blue sky with wispy clouds. In the foreground is a grassy lakeshore, punctuated by deciduous plants. Two deer wade in the shallow waters of the lower right while a hippopotamus gapes lower left. A middle-class family walks on the shoreline, not noticing that George Washington, dressed for the 1790s, stands twenty feet away. "The Most Popular Painting in America," the headline reads. It's nice.
We learn from reviewer Luc Sante that the painting was executed by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and reproduced in their new book -- "Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art." Their brilliant post-Dada neo-Warhol idea is to use the tools of public opinion analysis to dictate the style and content of painting. Telephone surveys and focus groups revealed the size, colors, and thematic elements that most Americans wanted to see. As Sante reports, "A hopping 88 percent favored a landscape, optimally featuring water, a taste echoed by the majority color preferences, blue being No.1 and green No. 2. Respondents also inclined toward realistic treatment, visible brushstrokes, blended colors, soft curves. They liked the idea of wild animals appearing, as well as people -- famous or not -- fully clothed and at leisure."
Komar and Melamid then commissioned similar polls in nine other countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Landscapes and blue won every time.
Putting aside for the moment delicious political/aesthetic arguments about popular art and unpopular art, we have to wonder why so many of us bipeds think that scenes of (relatively) untrammeled Nature are so pretty. A couple of years ago Stephen Kellert and E.O. Wilson proposed their "Biophilia Hypothesis" -- the idea that humans are hard-wired to love their natural surroundings -- and Komar and Melamid's evidence certainly seems to lend support. From a Darwinian point of view, why are we moved by our habitat? Why are blue and green the favorite colors of a species inhabiting a planet whose two most predominant colors, as seen from space, are blue and green?
That people the world over prize the beauty of nature is immensely comforting as we face a new century of nine billion of us yearning for consumerist abundance. But there also elements of Komar and Melamid that give pause. For one thing, people don't seem to prize nature in the close-up mode. Perhaps it speaks of our origins on the African savanna, but we tend to favor big-view landscapes with clearings: lakes and fields, mostly. People don't want to see trees from within the forest but from outside of it. There appears to be a pastoral gene within us that wants to clear away underbrush and reveal perspectives. This might work OK in Kenya, biodiversity wise, but it's hell in Brazil.
Also, we apparently like to see ourselves in the foreground. Recognizable, un-naked, and at ease. As they say in the focus groups, we enviros can't forget to put people in the picture.
TODAY ON THE SITE
Sometimes it hurts so much to be so right. In the less-than-nine months of this Website's existence, we have beat the drum about big developments in a new generation of fuel-efficient cars. We got three cool High Fives: from Amory Lovins and colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute; from Dan Becker and Steve Pedery of the Sierra Club; and from Jeff Zesiger of the Tour de Sol team. We consistently feature instructive rants in this column, most recently when we cited new car breakthroughs as Story Number Three of The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997. So this morning we open our New York Times and our Wall Street Journal to find big page one articles on these new cars, reported as if a half million of their readers weren't already frequent visitors to Liberty Tree. Jerks.
Recent "Today" columns:
1/2: The Greatest Environmental Cause of the Year
12/31: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997
12/30: Bad Eating and Not Eating
12/29: Owning the Public Health Issue
12/23: Good Year for Vintage Climate
12/22: Save the Reefs
12/19: Mousemobile
12/18: Year of Fire
12/17: Ramblin' Man (Ramblin' Woman)
12/16: Big News on the Margins
12/15: The Hybrid As Savior
12/12: Good Week for the Dragon
12/11: Help Wanted: Unreasonable Extremists
12/10: Oh Boy! A Fight!
12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"
To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.