About worldviews and visual arts.

Abstract


1. All religions are worldviews but all worldviews are not religions.

2. A worldview is the general set of elements that characterizes one's understanding of reality or more generally one's view of the world. In other words a worldview gives its adherents a view about reality, the world, themselves... and, that we wish it or not, the fact is that we all adhere to one or another worldview be it conscientiously or unconscientiously.
Worldviews have always acted as the glue binding atoms (individuals) together in their corpus (society), as such we can affirm that, worldviews are a function of the evolution of humanity.

3. The principle of "humanity" is formed by the interactions between its opposites poles: its corpus (society) and its constitutive atoms (the individuals). That means that all changes in the human condition are powered by the energy emanating from those interactions and this implies that both poles are equally important. Any excess of preponderance of one or the other pole indicates a disruption in the organic mode of human evolution and the observation of any such disruption gives the diagnostic of a malady, of an illness, in the developmental process of the human specie in general.

4. Visual arts, and more particularly painting, were assigned the task to "illustrate", at the attention of all members of society, the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. The human evolutionary process selected vision as the primary tool of survival... and so humans came naturaly to use visual signs as their preferred tools for sharing, among themselves the worldview of the men of knowledge of their times.

5. The assembling of humans in groups was always very fragile and to assure its survival it was in need of a binding glue that took the form of belief systems accepted by all individuals. Over time those belief systems translated into coherent sets of axioms gaining their societies a unified interpretation of the principle of reality. Such unquestioned axioms form, the roots, the foundations of all civilizations.



Worldviews and visual arts.


The evolution from great apes to the human race is a scientific hypothesis that has received ample verification. This hard fact is confirmed by hard discoveries but what is more difficult to pinpoint is the process setting humans on the road of visual representations of their cultural values and ideas.

We now know that animals communicate between themselves, they have cultures that unify all the individuals in one group to behave according to the values of their culture. But what brought the human animal to draw, paint and sculpt? I think that the answer to that question has to be derived out of the act of representation itself.

Nature and the process of evolution do not generate unnecessary functions in a specie. Everything that is there is there for a good reason, it is there to answer an existing necessity. So the functionality of visual representations has to be seen as an evolutionary answer of the human specie to a necessity it was confronted with. We know for a sure fact that human societies were producing visual representations since early on. We know this for the archaeological discoveries of a few of those representations. What we also know is that the societies that produced those early representations had belief systems that have come to be known under the term "animism", a worldview, that had common traits anywhere and at any time around the world. The question that now arises is what did an animist worldview fulfill as function for the societies where it was in practice?

That worldview was one view of the world, one vision of reality, among many possible views. Nonetheless it had similar traits anywhere and at any time for it was based on the realities of human life: nourishing the body (reproducing the individual), sexual pleasure (reproducing the specie), harmonizing in one's environment (ecology) and respecting the power of the sun that creates the days and the seasons. The visual representations of those traits can be observed in the "art" productions of any animist society. (primitive art)

So what was the role of those representations? Again I come back to this idea that if something takes place in nature the reason why it takes place has to be found in the function that it exercises. The only plausible function that I can see is that the shaman who was the man of knowledge of his group, of his tribe, used visual signs to share his vision of reality with his fellow tribesmen. The survival of the individuals was dependent on the survival of the group and this could only be guaranteed through a unity of views shared by all members of the group. Disunity of views would have destabilized the group and impeached its fulfilling of the necessary tasks to assure the survival of its members.

Tribes were sometimes affiliated with other tribes in some sort of loose confederacy sharing some particular values that allowed for a smooth coexistence among them at least in times of plenty.

For reasons that still have not been fully understood, at a given time, one tribe could go on a rampage and by force of arms unify all the other tribes around it within what then came to be called later on as a nation. (a modern concept) For exemple Tsongstan Gambo unified militarily the Tibetan Tribes in the 8th century and introduced Buddhism as the unifying worldview of his newfound kingdom. Over the next centuries Buddhism will compete with "Bonism", local animist worldview, for acceptance by the "Tibetans". Buddhism will finally be imposed as the official religion in the 13th century by the conquering Mongols.

In the end of the 12th century Genghis Khan had been on a rampage finally unifying the various Mongolian clans in 1206. His rampage extended then to the adjacent lands and thus Tibet conquered by Khubilai Khan, Genghis' grandson, came under the umbrella of the Chinese empire that Khubilai had conquered and was leading as its emperor.

The unification of the Chinese tribes had taken place much earlier, sometime, BC 3000.

This process of unification can be seen at work in all parts of the world. Local tribes, clans, sharing a similar animist worldview were unified by the force of arms. Some will never be unified and continue to live to this day under an animist worldview except that our modern worldview is making us to steal from them their natural habitat.

The unification of local groupings into kingdoms and empires has generally coincided with the adoption of:
- a religion (gods)
- a central authority (politics and military)
- the idea of being the center of the world
- a written language

All those elements somehow combined to give the newly grouped nations a new worldview where religion generally took center stage. Competition was now between nations and turned out to take variable forms. If the general traits of animism were globally shared by local groups anywhere around the world things took a new turn with the birth of nations. These were times of differentiation and the observed differences helped to solidify the bonds between "nationals".

The process of change from animism to religions that I try to describe here is inscribed in the long haul history. The worldviews did not change overnight. It was more as a hundreds of years long competitive process where religions borrowed much of animist practices to gain acceptance. The same went for the structures of power. Nations that succeeded to survive over the long haul were affirming and deepening the content of their proper set of views about reality and thus differentiating even further with the other surviving nations. This describes basically the formation of civilizations.

A civilization is somehow like a house. Foundations are laid in the ground upon which the house is then being build and once the house is built the foundations become invisible like hidden in the ground. We live in houses and forget about their foundations and, when a house has structural problems, only building technicians remember about those foundations and go check what has gone wrong with them.

Societies are vastly more complex than houses but basically the analogy stands the test. Their foundations are unknown to most of the individuals who have no clue at all that what they think and how they think is founded in those unknowns. Only a few thinkers are conscientious about the civilizational foundations that formed the ideas and belief systems of our societies and how they continue to shape the formation of our ideas in the present.

If we can understand that foundations are hidden we do nonetheless not necessarily know what our civilizations are all about . Everyone can see a house but a civilization remains largely invisible, indeed, it's not a material construct. We all can observe some of the components of its branches in the form of our cultures but most of us fail to see the tree. For example we all can see that Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African or Muslim paintings do not belong to the sphere of the Western civilization and we all, kind of instinctively, know that the works of Leonardo, Rubens, Van Gogh and Picasso are part of the Western civilization. But what is a civilization, and what is the difference between culture and civilization, remain questions whose answers are largely unknown and ignored. We can abstractly understand the principle of our civilizations having foundations but we have difficulties to describe the house of our civilizations for the good reason that our civilizational house is never completely built. Generation after generation we build add-ons to it and what we are conscientious about as individuals, who are part of a generation, is the cultural add-on we are participating in and not the civilization as a whole. What we all, in various degrees, know something about are the ideas and values that shape our present day culture but how our culture participates in the building of our civilization remains largely a mystery.

A civilization is the building, over its original foundations, of snapshots of the cultural behaviors of the different human generations throughout its history. It is the addition of the successive cultural moments of societies sharing the same foundations. In that sense, the civilization of a given society can encompass a very large variety of cultural values and behaviors. It can even encompass what appears as opposite values: one extreme pole on the ladder of behavioral possibilities at a given time and the other extreme pole at another given time.

Culture is the result of the ways of behaving and of doing by societies and individuals at a given time. For example, present day culture is our present day way of life: the goods and services that feed our consumerism through mass marketization, the merchandization of all that touches human life and our dependence on salary and debt. This implies that culture is kind of a historic snapshot of the way of a society at a given time.

In the past, multiple generations were sharing roughly the same culture over the long haul. A good example of this state of affairs is found in Western Europe where culture, in the form of Christian ideas and values imposed by Rome, was transmitted largely unchallenged and thus unchanged, generation after generation, from the 4th-5th century till around the 15th century. A turning point is reached with the Renaissance (15th-16th centuries) that establishes ideas and values celebrating private ownership, individualism and the rationality emerging out of the logic of capital. Cultural change will then go accelerating in parallel with scientific, technological and economic changes and the founding values of the Renaissance will be spreading around the world giving hegemony to the rationality of the logic of capital.

Observing China's history one finds identical patterns of cultural change at work. The age of the hundred schools of thoughts (AD500-200) were succeeded by the re-unification of the warring kingdoms under an imperial dynasty and the imposition of Confucianism upon the Chinese society which itself imposed one particular version of Chinese culture on generation after generation of individuals from BC 200 to AD 1900. A turn is reached around 1900 after China's cultural certainties had been weakening for two centuries at the contact of more advanced Western rifles and canons. The idea that generally was adopted by all Chinese intellectuals at the time was to integrate Western scientific prowess with Chinese traditions. Another turn is reached with the import by the communists into the country of the concept of capital and the ensuing decision to industrialize the country (1960-1990) that will culminate with Deng Xiao ping's "reform and opening" policies.

It appears thus that cultural change is not following a regular clock-like mechanism. Seismic cultural ruptures seem indeed to have been followed by long periods of "relative cultural stability". Those seismic cultural ruptures correspond to a shift in the worldview of the individuals within a civilization. The term worldview was coined from the German word Weltanschaung (look onto the world) which denotes a comprehensive set of opinions about what reality is all about. Worldviews were only achieving wide and unquestioning support very slowly over time.

The foundations of our present day civilizations were established in pre-history times, by this I mean that, their emergence has not been acted in written accounts and in consequence we remain largely in the dark about their formation. But notwithstanding this gap we can clearly identify their founding axioms. I give a relatively detailed account of those axioms for the Western and Chinese civilizations in my post "THE AXIOMS OF CIVILIZATIONS = the founding building blocks upon which societies build their future".
It seems that civilizations start somehow with the political unification of local groups and with "the invention of the gods" or with the waning of animism. The transition from animism to the creation of the gods takes place historically at different times for each center of civilization. China and Sumer invent their first gods sometime 5-6,000 years ago or earlier. Other centers will follow up later on and some ethnic groups are still living in animist cultures today. What all this shows us is a deep differentiation between the people of this earth in their levels of societal development. This reality does not imply, in any way, a judgment about the people who live in different stages of societal development.

Animism corresponds to an early worldview giving humans to glorify the elements that visually appeared to them as commanding the phenomena that directly impacted on their survival: the sun, the moon, the animals and plants that nourished them and sex and their reproduction. Because they were not or did not cut themselves from their environment they could directly experience and hear the song of the earth, the song of life and feel being one with their environment. That this worldview was the result of conscientious thinking or not does not matter. What matters is the result or the consequence of this conscientious or unconscientious behavior: a deep respect for everything in nature, a limitation of the species' take from nature that was limited to the satisfaction of the primary needs of its members to reproduce their existence.

Visual arts were not perceived in the age of animism nor in the age of the gods in the same light as they are nowadays. They were indeed not considered as art, those productions had a direct functionality, they were illustrations of the ideas and values of the men of knowledge of their day: the shaman in animism and the priest under the gods. The artists were simply image makers, illustrators, publicists of the ideas of others.

The worldviews of the men of knowledge were imposed by the men of power and the artist's job was to illustrate those worldviews. The freedom of the artists was limited to form, content was imposed on him.

Things will start to change with the Renaissance. Towns and cities were developing at the non-controlled and wild intersections between manors generating demographic growth and the need for more craft productions and trade. On this particular West-European reality will be superposed the consequences of a brutal and primitive urge to impose the Christian creed upon the Middle East:

- . . advanced Arab sciences and the long lost Greek classics made their entry in the rooms of the literate, I mean the clergy, all others were indeed illiterate including the laymen painters. Clergymen being the buyers of images their reading the classics and the Arab university publications will unleash their demand for change in the rendering of the form of their new image orders.
- . . the aristocracy had a taste for the luxuries of more advanced lands and long distance trade took root to satisfy their needs and desires. Walls that had been left bare until then will now be decorated with mirrors, tapestries and paintings. Interior decoration was born to satisfy the desire of the aristocracy for luxuries and their ideas about life: individualism, private ownership,...


Here is the turning point between the age of the gods and the modern times. Increased trade combines with the newly discovered desire by the aristocracy and then the new rich for luxuries.
The values and ideas of the aristocracy and the new rich merchants have mutated. They now search to establish as rights what their newly found material wealth can buy and individual ownership becomes the center of their discourse. Owning a richly decorated mansion gives them the sense of being different from the masses and this newly found perception of a differentiation infuses their minds with the illusion of their particularism, of the importance of their individualities. The aristocracy and the new rich merchants are driving the new fashion of the day and individualism and private ownership will ultimately take center stage in the European social game.

At this turning point in history the Christian church that has been hegemonic for over 1000 years is still the dominating force and it will take another few centuries for its dominance to wane. The sacred images hanging on the walls of the churches continue to illustrate the Christian creed. In this environment of social and cultural change interior decoration luxuries will try to catch up with the sacred character of the images hanging on the walls of the churches. Paintings on the walls of the manors of the aristocracy and the new rich will posit the sacrality of their newly discovered values of individuality and private ownership. Their portraits and environing landscapes act as a stamp of sacrality adorning their walls. Here is the point when art in Western Europe takes its sacred character. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witness the assembling of large collections of paintings. Mansions, castles and palaces are filled with the sacred character of the visual representations of the shaping worldview. Those investments are not typically capitalistic they are more of the nature of procuring prestige. Only later will the acqired ustensils of prestige be exchanged on the market for money and then be converted into capital to finance the production of canons and socks.

In the meanwhile the flow of money increases and the surpluses are invested in trading ventures and later in production. In this process something goes largely unnoticed by all the participants. Everything seems to be normal but something absolutely stunning is nevertheless happening: the logic of their invested capital is starting to dictate the actions of capital owners. They are not acting out of their own will any longer, the generation of profits, of surpluses is now what dictates their conduct. One could argue that they freely accept and even search for the consequences of the logic of capital that in last instance is engulfing them into always more opportunities of luxuries. The rationality of the logic of capital is then presented as what is good, desirable and what should be encouraged by societies. And why not will you ask. Well I think that when one accepts to abdicate blindly his own right at free examination of what is to be done for the chimera of a quick buck guaranteed by a mechanical logic, well then one decides to abdicate not only the short term but also everything that comes in the future engendered by the rationality of that logic of the invested capital. I guess that I don't need to make a drawing about what kind of consequences one exposes oneself by following such a flawed logic. But what is more fundamental even is that by abdicating your free will to the rationality of the logic of capital you not only expose yourself to consequences, you expose the whole of your society.

Here we are today with poisoned waters, poisoned air, deforestation, climate change, the most brutal of species extinctions that ever happened, and the steadying possibility of our human extinction... and all this has been dictatorially imposed on all of us by a tiny minority of capital owners who are totally unconscientious about the consequences of their actions.

Till when will humanity as a whole continue to accept such a paltry state of affairs?


Modernism concludes nowadays not only with this real possibility of our own provoking human mass extinction but also with the real possibility of a new found control of our actions that could be leading to a radically better future for every citizen on this earth. What will make the balance tilt towards one side or the other? I think ourselves and nothing else. What do I mean by that? Well we sure have ended the 20th century in the most glaring confusion in art no doubt about that and more generally in our cultural behavior but this is not in any way implying that we can't reach out for sense anymore.

Whatever the outcome for humanity, it makes no doubt that we have entered an area of change unparalleled in human history. If we succeed to glide around the obstacles before us the future could be very interesting. Never has humanity seen such an extensive range of fundamental changes interacting upon one another. This is a systemic exception for sure or is it some form of conclusion

Other posts relating to the same subject can be found here.
If interested in a more thorough presentation of those ideas, read my book ARTSENSE that dwells along 310 pages on those ideas.


Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Art is a trial at answering the question "what is reality?".

I guess that if we spend our time and energy crafting sentences with words it is not only for the sake of spending our time it is, I believe, to express some thought in the hope to shed some light on our understanding of reality. We should thus expect coherence in the verbal expression of our thoughts; is it not.

It seems to me that we are somehow permanently dancing around a question without ever admitting that this question really exists. This question is "What is reality?". This question is at the heart of artistic creation and out of it there simply is no art, it is also at the heart of philosophies and religions and let us be very clear this question has nothing to do with marketing nor with anything that relates to money nor capital.

Dark matter, dark energy, empty space are concepts derived by scientists (astrophysicists) out of their visions at the end of their "tunnel enquiries". In the case of dark matter and dark energy the "tunnel enquiry" is in the direction of the outer limits of our macro-universe. In this particular form they start their "tunnel enquiries" at the eye of a telescope zooming always further in the search for new "images". Another widely popular form is for scientists to focus their attention on the microcosm, zooming always deeper into the infinitely small with the help of microscopes. The form of their approach looks different but essentially they are doing the same thing they are "tunnel enquiring" towards infinitely small details with the hope that the workings of those details will reveal to them the workings of reality as a whole.

The most serious problem with such an approach is that the collected images are invariably describing a detail only of a near infinite macrocosm or of a near infinite micrososm. The epistemic question that thus arises from such scientific studies is "How could the study of such a small detail give us a clue about the working of the whole?". There is indeed a "whole" inside which we are only infinitesimal particles and it is the working of that very whole that constitutes the reality in which our lives unfold.

Scientists are peering always further from the "here and now" of their position as observers but this gives them no more than images of far away details that make no sense of the working of the global reality...

Philosophies have generally taken an opposite path searching for sense in "the whole" wherein we live while neglecting the parts-like machinery. To summarise (outrageously I'm afraid):
- on one side are the founding philosophies of the religions of the word which posit that the observed infinite chain of causalities has to be interrupted for the sake of human sanity. Their argument then goes that there is an "ultimate mover" who starts the chain of causality. Aristotle appears to give the most extensive presentation of such a thesis. What follows in the next historic bubble is no more than folk stories (religions) that will be used as social glues to keep kingdoms and empires together.
- on the other side are the philosophies derived out of "animism" a system of thought that humanity unanimously shared for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even for as long as hundreds of thousands of years. At the turn of their establishing and enforcing power the religions of the word brutally destroyed any remnant of animism in their geographic areas of control. In all other areas animism survived or was integrated in "superior" philosophical systems. Everywhere animism posited that humans, animals and plants are particles of "the whole", "the one"... and that they are somehow bound or linked all together which implies a code of morality obliging humans to respect animals and plants and the working of their environment.

With the start of agriculture that followed the last period of climate change some 11,000 years ago greater concentrations of people could survive on a same territory... this is what led gradually to the assembling of different tribes under political and military leadership. This is also the crosspoint in history when philosophies and religions took root and were then imposed on all by the men of power.

It should be noted that capitalism and its ideology of rationality took root where one of "the religions of the word", christianity, had established a firm grip on the beliefs of the people under its control... and that appears to be in Europe and subsequently in all the territorial extensions where Europeans established themselves and imposed their worldview to the natives.

I'd like to suggest that scientific rationality let on its own will most probably lead humanity to an early extinction. Our choice, if we have one, is to recognize and accept the limitations of capitalistic and scientific rationality... and our vital need for an interaction between rationality and philosophy. For sure this is the opinion of an artist, of a thinker, some will argue that, as such, it is not even worth the listening. But I have the weakness to believe that the artist's role has mutated over the last century. Visual artists have been along all the time-span of our cultural history no more than image technicians; craftsmen polishing the visual lines of the stories told by the men of knowledge of their times. But this changed sometime around 1900 when the men of knowledge lost the support of the men of power who were on their way to transforming into state-machinery technicians, in other words, who were transforming into bureaucrats whose vision was limited to the internal working of the newly built institutional system. That is when visual artists were freed of the imposition to represent the worldview of the men of knowledge.

Picasso who had some good friends in the mathematical circles, and the cubists, related to the buss-words "en vogue" in their time with mathematicians to explain reality: the fourth dimension, relativity and so on. The surrealists were more attuned with the new "psychology" theories developped by Freud, Jung and other students of the psyche.

Without to understand this very clearly, after the turn of the 19th century, visual artists started to reject the image that projects on the retina. In other words visual artists were rejecting the realism that the mechanics of our eye's sensors were giving us to see...

What is that visual mechanic of human eyes good for after all?
Nothing more than to let us know what is moving around us so that we could possibly do what it takes to preserve our existence. In other words our eyes are no more than functional sensors that our evolution gratified us with in order to help us assure our preservation... In a sense, yes, our eyes reflect in our brains images of reality but in another sense we also understand that these images that our eyes are giving us to see are very limitative giving us to see only a very narrow segment of what could be possible to see. So our brains were naturally frustrated and with the development of scientific approaches towards all the fields of reality our brains somehow encouraged us to develop visual images of what we started to understand but that our eyes could not apprehend.

Visual imagings have been for so many tens of thousands of years at the centre of the mechanics of the human animal's survival that they have established themselves as our leading sense. Other animals developped other sensors based on the application of other principles: infra-red, sound and so many other that are still unknown.

So here we are now trying to answer the same old question "What is reality?".

Scientists go to it through the road of that particular logic of rationality without understanding that rationality is no more than the ideology of the "logic of capital" that, applied for some seven to eight centuries (in Europe at least), imposed itself as being the ultimate truth teller within the industrial societies. But the negativities for the human race should, by now, start to sink into our minds. The application of that rationality, along such a short time-span of only a few centuries, has already succeeded to rapidly and surely conduct to the extinction of our species. Rationality can no longer be left on its own to direct the evolution of the human species. But understand me well, rationality should not be rejected per se it remains indeed a very powerfull tool to help create a better tomorrow for all the children of our earth: humans animals and plants alike. Specializing in the understanding of the particles of the whole scientific rationality needs now to be confronted to an all encompassing system of thought akin to animism, a philosophy, that would be accepted and shared, if not by all then, at least by most of the citizens on our earth. This will be seen as a dream and will surely be portrayed as the vision of an idealist but I'm absolutely sure that I'm the only one that is utterly realist here. I do not one moment believe that such a move or such a convergence between science and philosophy will come about through the conscient exercise of human decision-makers. No. Decision-makers will resist that move but in the end they will be overwhelmed by what the historian Toynbee called "necessity". We already can see the first signs of such a necessity and the first answers coming from the decision-makers. Look only at climate change. But when I speak about necessity I have in mind something all-together a lot more world-changing. I'm not divining here but for the sake of understanding just try for a moment to imagine what it could be like in a situation like the one described in the movie "The day after tomorrow", or for the sake of realism just look at the answers coming after New-Orleans or the South-East Asia Tsunami... and imagine what comes next.

Painters have been discharged of the obligation to represent visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge of their times but let's be honest most painters and most other visual artists are mostly lost nowadays not knowing what to illustrate nor what ideas to express in their creations. My own take on this whole story is that visual artists, if they want to make sense out of what they are doing, have no escape but to accumulate scientific and philosophic knowledge that eventually could help them to regurgitate a plausible vision of the worldview that a surviving humanity will come to share within the next decades.

If interested by what I wrote here, read my book ARTSENSE that dwells along 310 pages on those ideas.


Tags:
art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power,

Worldview versus religion.

An interesting story came out in The Journal of Religion and Society: "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies."

The author, Gregory S. Paul, posits the following in his introduction:

• "That radically differing worldviews can have measurable impact upon societal conditions is plausible according to a number of mainstream researchers (Bainbridge; Barro; Barro and McCleary; Beeghley; Groeneman and Tobin; Huntington; Inglehart and Baker; Putman; Stark and Bainbridge).
• Agreement with the hypothesis that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and quality restricted to one population (Benson .; Hummer .; Idler and Kasl; Stark and Bainbridge).
• The twentieth century acted, for the first time in human history, as a vast Darwinian global societal experiment in which a wide variety of dramatically differing social-religious-political-economic systems competed with one another, with varying degrees of success. A quantitative cross-national analysis is feasible because a large body of survey and census data on rates of religiosity, secularization, and societal indicators has become available in the prosperous developed democracies including the United States."

The conclusions highlight the following points:

• The United States' deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004).
• Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developed democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism.
• Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious, less wealthy prosperous democracies.
• Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions?
• There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002).

Gregory S. Paul then concludes:
"It is the responsibility of the research community to address controversial issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses."

• the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life" that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards.
• The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.
• Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.

I just discovered the following post If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are Wrong that illustrates the topic of this post. The comments are most interesting too.


Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Science imaging + philosophy = my personal approach in creating visual signs.

My last posts were illustrating the kinds of images that will most profoundly impact on the formation of the future worldview that will be shared around the global village in the coming future zooming-in the micro levels of reality, zooming-out into the macro levels of reality and zooming in abstraction, the pure abstraction of mathematical models.

My basic thesis in ARTSENSE is that the forming of that future truly global worldview will form out of the interaction between these 3 forms of zoomings and... with philosophic wisdoms from around the world that will help us to see from a distance the reality described by these 3 different forms of zooming and also will help us to see ourselves in all of that.

This thesis forms the content of my book ARTSENSE that just came out of the presses. It is available here presently and shall be available within a few weeks on Amazon, Borders and other.

Here follow some of my visual signs that I give as a trial at illustrating the coming global worldview that I'm speaking about:


Transformation from order to chaos.


Expansion and opportunities: many potential roads are arising but only one will materialize.


One road materialzes: life in the form of a first cell.


Nature's urge for more complexity or the strategic principle of the transformation of reality


Competitive growth or the tactical principle of the transformation of reality.


Coming out of 6 months of writing.


Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Science imaging: towards new patterns out of mathematical knowledge.

Our worldview is clearly being shaken under the impact of evolving scientific understanding but I think that more than scientific discoveries, the science images in direction of the infinite and those in the direction of the infinitesimal are having a more direct telling impact upon our psyche. Scientific discoveries remain rather abstract but eventually gain in visual strength at the contact of what we make out of those pictures from space and from the infinitesimal.
"Day by day, in a world beyond human vision, we explore fascinating forms and structures write the members of Eye of Science. Space imaging is thus going to directly impact upon humanity's conscience of the interconnectedness and interdependence of life on Earth with the Universe.

The Frenchman Mandelbrot became convinced that a common theme of structures runs through all of these real-world problems. In 1975 he coined the term fractal to describe these structures, and published his ideas in "Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension" (translated into English as Fractals: form, chance and dimension in 1977). He emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models of many natural phenomena and he held the view that fractals were, in many ways, more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry.

Artists sized with enthusiasm on Mendelbrot's approach and they are churning images out of their programs at the speed of breads baked in industrial baking factories. The profusion of fractal images available on the net is simply astounding.
Notwithstanding the popularity of fractals and other pixel manipulation programs artists digital works are still not generally recognized as being art works by the managers and the bureaucracy of the arts. But it makes no doubt in my mind that digital techniques are nothing more than the 21st century brush and pencil of the Middle-Age painter so I do not see how digital techniques could be held at the margins of what is considered art for much longer.

The cultural reassessment of the visual arts, that is engendered today under the pressure of the exponential rise in scientific imaging, is pulling humanity to awaken at the dawn of what will be seen a few centuries from now as the greatest of renaissances, as the unification of humanity under the banner of "citizens for an earth humanity".

In the past tribes have been unified under the banner of Nations and then States today we see the day pointing when Nations and States shall be unified at the level of the earth. How should we coin this new reality of the citizenry of the world, the cells of Gaia?

Some usefull links:
URL: The Fractal Art Manifesto (by Kerry Mitchell)
URL: Fractal Art Contests
URL: Software tools
URL: Fractal links page by Paul Lee

Some fractals.


Rotating Swirls. By Michael Trott, published by Wolfram Research, Inc.


Surface of Revolution of a Logarithmic Spiral. By Sándor Kabai, published by Wolfram Research, Inc.


Inverted Array of Spheres. By Michael Trott, published by Wolfram Research, Inc.


Inverted Periodic Surface. By Michael Trott, published by Wolfram Research, Inc.


Harmageddon. Fractal of the Day by Jim Muth


Mask - Rumored to be a celeb going incognito.



Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Science imaging: Towards the microcosm

Science gives us to see further than the first degree image that projects on our retinas and ... when it comes to seeing more, science holds a marvelous tool-chest of techniques. Science has indeed drastically demultiplied the potential of first degree images that our retinas can absorb. Basically science helps us enlarging our vision of reality in three directions:

• towards the microscopic,
• towards the macroscopic
• towards the abstraction emerging out of mathematical formulas.

The visual imaging derived from scientific approaches is now transforming what has been our visual normality until very recently I mean this first degree image of reality projecting on our retina. It will gradually expands humanity's visual horizons towards the micro and macro infinites while giving us the tools that will allow us to dwell into the patterns of the real resulting from the non-ending changes that constitute the deep reality of our universe.

One thing is for sure we will more and more be inundated under visual signs and images that are not resulting directly from the direct projection of an "existing" on our retinas. I mean the proportion of images that are derived from environments not directly accessible to the human eye but made accessible through the intervention of some technological captioning device is become absolutely dominant and this will not go without dramatic consequences for the individuals and their societies.

It makes no doubt at all that such a multiplication of visual images of things that are so largely unknown today by the citizens of the world will have an incalculable impact upon the perception of reality and its understanding by future generations:

• scientific imaging is bound to modify our perception of what reality is all about. Those images will be giving to all a visual innate understanding of aspects of reality that earlier were only accessible to highly educated and specialized people. Something as an innate basic understanding of the complexity of reality will be made possible from the systemic nature of our cosmos to the systemic nature of the microscopic.
• scientific imaging will enlarge the scope of the visual forms and colors that are accepted by humans. Forms that were unknown earlier will gradually be "normalized" in the psyche of all on earth. This abundance and richness of forms and colors is bound to to have an immense effect on future visual representations in the arts and in design.
• scientific imaging will enhance the sense that some "hard-wiring" must be at work deep inside the "mechanics" of change that, in the end, is resulting in the coating of reality under a surface layer made of patterns that are somehow giving us the harmony and rhythm of the lines forms colors and sounds found in our reality.

See here some examples about scientific imaging towards the microscopic. These are all images representing a snapshot of reality... albeit at a level that is inacessible to our naked eye. What is represented here is thus as much real as the face of a person represented in a portrait or a landscape brushed on a canvas.

1. From the "Microscopic Wood Anatomy of Central European species website". This site hosts a giant archive of high resolution images open to the public.

Radius section of Pinus Strobus L. White Pine

Radial section. Prunus armeniaca L. Stone Fruit: Apricot

2. From the site "Molecular expressions". The Molecular Expressions website features photo galleries that explore the fascinating world of optical microscopy offering one of the Web's largest collections of color photographs taken through an optical microscope (commonly referred to as "photo-micro-graphs").

Photomicrograph and digital image (photographs taken through an optical microscope) of the World's most famous beers: Budweiser (US).

Photomicrograph and digital image (photographs taken through an optical microscope) of the World's most famous beers: Busch (US).

Photomicrograph and digital image (photographs taken through an optical microscope) of the World's most famous beers: Becks (Germany)

Photomicrograph and digital image (photographs taken through an optical microscope) of the World's most famous beers: Fischer LaBelle Strasbourgeoise (France).

3. From "MicroAngela": a creation of Tina (Weatherby) Carvalho of the Biological Electron Microscope Facility, (BEMF), part of the Pacific Biomedical Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

This is a house fly, Musca domestica. The mouthparts of the fly (the proboscis) are complex structures specially adapted for sucking up fluids. Its head is about half centimeter across. Check now a zoom on its mouth...

Cuticle Around Insect Gland

Insects often have intricately sculptured cuticles. This fly had a pretty smooth exoskeleton, except for this area around a pheromone gland. Probably the cuticle has this shape to provide for more surface area for the hormone that is secreted to flow and then evaorate. Pheremones are used to attract the other gender of the same species for mating.

Insect Eye

Many insects have large compound eyes, made up of many six-sided compartments called ommatidia. Each ommatidium has a lens, a crystalline rod, and a collection of light-sensitive cells. Each ommatidium functions as a on/off and bright/dim detector. Insects with the best eyes can probably form a pretty good image, but they are best at detecting movement, for finding prey or for avoiding predators. Dragonflies may have as many as 36,000 ommatidia in each eye. Some insects, like bees and butterflies, can see colors well.

Over time the proliferation of images out of the treasure trove of scientific imaging will have a lasting impact on our perception of reality and thus also on the shaping of the future visual arts. The acceptance of scientific imaging will transform the knowledge behind it into a hegemonic culture and its values will be taken over as the common sense values of all. Thus a consensus culture will develop in which everybody will come to identify the knowledge of the men of knowledge with his own system of belief ...and the present-time culture sucker power-art triumvirate will not make his mea-culpa but will run to follow the worldview of the time.

The cultural reassessment of the visual arts, that is engendered today under the pressure of the exponential rise in scientific imaging, is pulling humanity to awaken at the dawn of what will be seen a few centuries from now as the greatest of renaissances, as the unification of humanity under the banner of "the citizenry of the earth".

Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Science imaging: Towards the macrocosm

The 20th century visual art world has been characterized by trials and essays at surpassing the limitations artists felt landscapes and portraits, those first degree images that project on the retina, were imposing on their creations. Different schools of thought and style succeeded one another presenting an evolving landscape of the visual arts and eventually the adventure concluded with the death of painting around the 1980th when the art world lost complete conscience of its historical functionality at diffusing the visual signs of the worldview of the day.

Coinciding with the death of painting an imaging revolution was slowly put in motion in the world of science:

- in the underground of university laboratories scientists coupling lenses light and cameras were trying to render in visual images the infinitely small in biology chemistry physics in order to advance their knowledge. The visuals of the infinitely small were so surprising that they appealed to the artistic sensitivity of scientists and artists alike.

- space endeavors, pursued in the footsteps of earlier observations by astronomers, returned to earth a myriad of photographic images from the macrocosm going back in earlier times. The farther the distances the longer those images take to reach earth and it ensues thus that the farther the images have to travel the older will be the reality they represent.

- visual representations are behind our thinking mechanism, deriving the idea that natural phenomena were ordered according to recurring patterns, scientists developed mathematical formulas to give visual representations of such patterns. The visuals resulting from those formulas were so appealing that a scientific tool was born for artists to play with.

Check the following pictures, are they not worldview-changing?



Photographer/University of Wisconsin-Madison.
URL: UWMadison


Nasa astronomy picture of the ady: 2005 October 6
Spiral Galaxy NGC 1350
Credit: H. Boffin, H. Heyer, E.Janssen (ESO), FORS2, European Southern Observatory


Beautiful barred spiral galaxy NGC 613, a mere 65 million light-years away in the southern constellation Sculptor.
URL: Nasa astronomy picture of the day 2005 October 1


Staring across interstellar space, the alluring Cat's Eye nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth.
URL: Nasa's astronomy picture of the day. 2005 September 24


URL: 2005 September 18

M42: Wisps of the Orion Nebula
Credit & Copyright: John P. Gleason

Explanation: The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is probably the most famous of all astronomical nebulas.

In the same vain as those stills, please view the following videos of Nasa... they are simply stunning and brimming with truth.
entering into our galaxy
leaving our galaxy

Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Some pictures of my exhibition at Vinciland Gallery in Beijing.

At the door of Vinciland Gallery.


With professor Sun of Beida University and Huo Xing a german businessman...


With my wife Sharon.


With Lao Wang a specialist of Chinese antiques and old paintings on the Chinese stock exchanges.


Four works about perception, the theory of complexity and the emergence of life. about the emergence of life.


Meditation is followed by the naming of things with signs and words

Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Back from Beijing (2)

We landed in Beijing on September the 8th and went straight to the Vinciland Gallery that is located in Zone A of the East-End Art district of Beijing. What followed were really hectic days shared between family, visitors to the exhibition and professionals of the Chinese art and auction world.

What I retained from those days are lively discussions that somehow comforted me in thinking that I'm on the right track. Those of you who have been reading my posts with some regularity know by now my vision of art and more particularly of the visual arts. The discussions that I refer to were dwelling into the arcanes of that vision.
In sumary I think that art is nothing more than an illustration of reality, as it is perceived by the men of knowledge of the day, at the attention of all the members of society.

My idea that modern science somehow confirms the underlying principles espoused by Chinese traditional philosophy generally came as a total surprise for my Chinese friends. But their surprise fast transformed into interest. They never had thought indeed that modern science would one day come back confirming the axioms of their civilization.
From that point our discussions focused mostly on the intersection between the visions of scientists and the visions of philosophers, more particularly the visions of traditional Chinese philosophers.

Basically the Chinese understand that reality is not the image that our eyes are given to see but well a vast ensemble made of a complex set of factors interacting upon themselves that in finale power a chain of events precipitating change. As such they understand reality as the principle of change itself... Xieyi painting, for thousands of years, has been an exercise at rendering in visual terms the internal mechanism of the process of change particular to their subjects. But change was understood in abstract philosophical terms (civilizational axioms) while nowadays science allows to understand the physical realities that underpin those abstract principles. Herein lies, I believe, the essential differentiation with the past in terms of our present capability at understand reality.

As Xieyi painters needed to be well versed in philosophy modern painters do too, but they can not escape the necessity to be well versed also in science, for, out of science they exclude themselves from the worldview of the leading men of knowledge of the day, the scientists.
My Chinese friends generally came to agree with me, unfortunately, I can not say as much of my Western friends!

Keywords: art modern art art theory visual art power society

"Laodan's Art sense" is available

A 34 pages full color catalog of my works is out of the presses.

The book is available online at Laodan's Art sense

Preview here.



















Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual arts, power, society, visual art, knowledge

Exhibition of Laodan's works at the VINCILAND Gallery in Beijing

My works will be exhibited at the VINCILAND Art Gallery in Beijing from September 17 till October 25.

Galleries are a relatively new phenomenon in China and the art market is thus in an early stage of development where the un-substantial reigns. Among the proliferation of galleries some pearls emerge and the VINCILAND is decidedly one of those pearls.
More on the subject later.

Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Back from Beijing.

The plans that I layed out in my last post have been derailed by exceptional circumstances that occured in my private life.
My father in law passed away in Beijing on June 29th while I was there and I was shortly later informed through my webmail that my mother had passed away in Belgium 5 hours earlier than my father in law. So after a private funeral in Beijing we rushed to Belgium where we stayed for a week before coming back to Beijing where we had to terminate discussions about a soon to come exhibition of my works.

To Beijing for a month...

I'm leaving this night for Beijing and will interrupt my daily clippings on "In the air of our times" and my irregular posts on CRUCIAL TALK. I'll be back by July 15th when I'll restart my daily selections and ruminations.

In the meantime, I plan to post photos of my daily trips in Beijing and eventually some commentaries on my FLICKR site:
RSS
URL
I'll try to relay my postings on FLICKR to CRUCIAL TALK... hoping that it works.

Best,
Laodan


Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Answers for contemporary visual arts. Part 4: The economic road to religion.

In a nutshell:

We only have a vague understanding of the shift from "animist knowledge-power" to the later "military-political-religious power" and I posit that what happened during this foundational moment in the emergence of civilizations is what drives our societies till this very day.
From that time dates the shift in the function of art from "a societal tool for sharing the worldview of the men of knowledge under anismism" towards "a societal tool for imposing the worldview of the men of power under military-political-religious power".
It is my understanding that to comprehend what's going on in the art-world today, we have to understand this shift from animism to centralized power. The reason for this is quite simple I should say. We are indeed assisting nowadays at the disintegration of the model of society based on centralized power that governed societies for the last 5,000 years... but we experience difficulties trying to discover where all that is leading us and this is causing much confusion in late-modern societies and particularly all around the art-world. This temporary hole in societal consciousness is unfortunately shamelessly exploited by market vultures who, under the spell of the logic of capital, are totally blinded from any artistic or societal concerns.

What we know for a sure fact is that everywhere on earth two determining factors were at work for thousands of years whose interactions eventually unleashed the unifying of tribes under a central military-political leadership:

- .. the gradual emergence of agriculture allowing for larger concentrations of populations.

-.. the evolution of animist thoughts towards:

* or the creation of gods

* or secular philosophical systems.

Those two factors followed their specific ways in different geographic and climatic conditions and it follows thus that their interactions led to many variations on the themes of:

-.. tribal unification by force under centralized power

-.. adoption of religious / philosophical worldviews.

-.. adoption of societal cohesion building tools: language, laws, education, art,...

THE GRADUAL EMERGENCE OF AGRICULTURE.

The first signs of agricultural activities date some 10-11,000 years ago which is long after the appearance of anatomically modern humans and the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals have generated very few answers that resist scrutiny.
In "The origins of agriculture - a biological perspective and a new hypothesis", published in Australian Biologist 6: 96 - 105, June 1993, Greg Wadley & Angus Martin write: "Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls' hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws ... the data do not accord well with any one of these models. '
Recent discoveries of potentially psychoactive substances in certain agricultural products - cereals and milk - suggest an additional perspective on the adoption of agriculture and the behavioural changes ('civilisation') that followed it."
At this stage of our understanding of history, we have to accept the fact that there is no generally accepted explanation for the origin of agriculture.

Our general belief in the idea of progress ingrained deeply in all of us the belief that agriculture placed humans squarely on the road of progress but some inescapable facts suggest that humans were far worse off after they took up full-scale agriculture than when they were foraging:

• life expectancy: In "The worst mistake in the history of the human race"Jared Diamond writes that "Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron- deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post- agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infections... affecting their ability to survive."

• average height: paleopathologists have learned from skeletons that agriculture is directly linked to changes in human height. In "The worst mistake in the history of the human race" Jared Diamond writes that "Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors". I always had wondered how it was possible that the many mommies found in the desert of Xinjiang in the Western part of China were of people of 6 and often over 7 feet tall. (180, 210 cm) I guess that Diamond gave me the answer.
  
  

Jared Diamond gives "three sets of reasons lo explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health:
First, hunter- gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants - wheat, rice, and corn - provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.)
Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.
Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities".

So why in the world would humanity so uniformly around all the world have adopted a system that made it so much worse off than before?

Notwithstanding the limitations of the science of history we dispose nonetheless of some certainties:

1. Archaeological records indicates that plant and animal domestication arose independently in at least 7 to 9 separate locales: excavated millingstones indicate the use of small seeds and the find of cereal grains reported in archaeological diggings indicate the initial appearance of low level food production in the period going roughly from 10000 to 5000 years ago.

2. Detailed studies of Greenland ice cores & deep-sea mud cores suggest that climate change occurred regularly during the evolution of the human species from 2 million years ago to approximately 12,000 years ago and climatic fluctuations could be extremely abrupt on very short time scales. As R. Alley, P. Mayewski and B. Stauffer state in an article titled "Twin Ice Cores From Greenland Reveal History of Climate Change" Vol. 9, No. 2, October 1996, pp. 12-13. © 1996 American Geophysical Union: "Locked within two cores of ancient ice is evidence of unprecedented swings in Earth's climate throughout the ages. These icy archives tell us that large, rapid, global change is more the norm for the Earth's climate than is stasis." they then go on to conclude that "In short, the ice cores tell a clear story: humans came of age agriculturally and industrially during the most stable climatic regime recorded in the cores " See the graph here under from "The Science of Abrupt Climate Change" by Dr Jeffrey M. Masters.

Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson from Ohio State University and his research team have undertaken similar studies of ice cores from ice fields and glaciers in Peru, Bolivia, Antarctica, Greenland, Kurgyzstan, China, Africa and the Russian Arctic during the last quarter-century. Their studies found a similar cooling period, at the Younger Dryas, as seen on the graph here above from Greenland ice cores followed by a global warming. "These glaciers are very much like the canaries once used in coal mines. They're an indicator of massive changes taking place . . .in the tropics" says Thompson.

The global warming that started some 11-10,000 years ago was accompanied by monumental changes in the fauna and flora that led to an increase in the size of grains and also the concentration in certain areas of wild cereals in profusion. The argument then goes that pressed by other factors (population growth, drug addiction,...) humans took the presence of large quantities of cereals around them as an opportunity to source food.

The process took thousands of years to go from initial low level food harvesting to the appearance of full blown agriculture with settlement-subsistence systems centered around farming. Initially patches of land endowed with profusion of wild cereals were protected and harvested. Gradually seeds were sown and later land was cleared and tilt to increase the quantity and reliability of supply. It has to be noted that farming fully substituted hunting and plucking only in the last centuries... In "The transition to agriculture in Northwestern China" Bettinger, Barton, Elston, Madson, Brantingham, Oviatt, Wang and Choi argue that "... the interval between the initial appearance of (low level) food production and the appearance of full blown agriculture, as denoted by settlement-subsistence systems centered around food production, is perhaps 5500 years in Mesoamerica, 4000 years in eastern North America, and (arguably) 3000 years in the Near East".

Along the same line of massive global change or to be more accurate as a consequence of global warming some botanists suggest that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide acted as fertilizer on the fauna.

In an article titled "Origins of Agriculture" Robert C. Balling writes that

• "Rowan Sage of the University of Toronto's Department of Botany presented an opinion article in which he developed the idea that low atmospheric CO2 levels during the late Pleistocene era (the last great glacial advance, which ended about 12,000 years ago) did not allow agriculture to develop. Toward the end of that glacial era, CO2 levels had fallen below 200 ppm. As the earth began to pull out of the Ice Age, CO2 concentrations increased from roughly 200 ppm 15,000 years ago to more than 250 ppm 12,000 years ago.

• ... A rise in atmospheric CO2 levels would have increased productivity of many plants by up to 50 percent, as hundreds of studies show. Further, the water efficiency of domesticated plants increased, so they developed a competitive advantage over many weeds".

• "the remarkable synchrony of agricultural development around the world. Wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas were all domesticated in the Middle East by 10,000 years ago. In eastern Asia, rice and millets were domesticated 9,000 years ago. A thousand years earlier beans and chili peppers were "farmed" in Mesoamerica. Sugarcane in Southeast Asia, potatoes in the Andes, squash and sunflower in eastern North America, millet and sorghum in central Africa, and sesame and eggplant in India were all independently domesticated at about this same time".

• "Compared with the length of time of human existence, the period of initial plant domestication all around the world took place in the blink of an eye".

• "The conditions during the Pleistocene simply did not allow plant domestication and the successful establishment of agriculture—low carbon dioxide levels certainly could have played a major role".

3. Greg Wadley & Angus Martin, from the Department of Zoology of the University of Melbourne, write in "The origins of agriculture – a biological perspective and a new hypothesis" (published in Australian Biologist 6: 96 – 105, June 1993) that "The ingestion of cereals and milk, in normal modern dietary amounts by normal humans, activates reward centres in the brain. Foods that were common in the diet before agriculture (fruits and so on) do not have this pharmacological property. The effects of exorphins are qualitatively the same as those produced by other opioid and / or dopaminergic drugs, that is, reward, motivation, reduction of anxiety, a sense of wellbeing, and perhaps even addiction. Though the effects of a typical meal are quantitatively less than those of doses of those drugs, most modern humans experience them several times a day, every day of their adult lives".

Their argument goes as follows:

• Studies by "Zioudrou (1979) and Brantl (1979) found opioid activity in wheat, maize and barley (exorphins), and bovine and human milk (casomorphin), as well as stimulatory activity in these proteins, and in oats, rye and soy".

• "... researchers have measured the potency of exorphins, showing them to be comparable to morphine and enkephalin (Heubner et al. 1984), determined their amino acid sequences (Fukudome &Yoshikawa 1992), and shown that they are absorbed from the intestine (Svedburg et al.1985) and can produce effects such as analgesia and reduction of anxiety which are usually associated with poppy-derived opioids (Greksch et al.1981, Panksepp et al.1984). Mycroft et al. estimated that 150 mg of the MIF-1 analogue could be produced by normal daily intake of cereals and milk, noting that such quantities are orally active, and half this amount 'has induced mood alterations in clinically depressed subjects' (Mycroft et al. 1982:895)".

• "cereals and dairy foods are not natural human foods, but rather are preferred because they contain exorphins. This chemical reward was the incentive for the adoption of cereal agriculture in the Neolithic. Regular self-administration of these substances facilitated the behavioural changes that led to the subsequent appearance of civilisation".

4. For over a million years human ancestors have derived their subsistence from hunting animals and gathering fruits, roots, leaves and seeds. The same division of labor is invariably observed around the world: men go hunting, women gather they take care of the food, the medicine, the roof, the dress and the children.

Agriculture was thus typically an extension of women's gathering of seeds.

It should thus not come as a surprise that women took central stage in the socio-economic structures that emerged with the adoption of agriculture. This economic process has to be seen expanding gradually over thousands of years giving way to enlarged socio-political groupings that gradually abandon their nomadic migrating ways.

In summary:

With retreating glaciers by the end of the ice age some 12,000 years ago the world got warmer and wetter than before. Greater rainfall and a higher concentration of CO2 in the air nourished grasses like wild wheat and barley that in some areas thus spread like wild fires. This attracted large concentrations of grazing animals followed by hunter-gatherers who gradually abandoned their nomadic ways and settled down in villages. The individuals continued to share an animist worldview while women were asserting their centrality through an increased recourse to cereals. All early agriculturalist societies seem indeed to have been matriarchal...

Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society