No, this is not a discussion on how art is subjective and science, objective. No, it is also not about how science is rational and arts may not be. On the other hand, I am also not trying to find the intersection (set theory) of arts and science (which may indeed be a null set!). All I am willing to say is I do not know. And, from this claim of ignorance is born this post – something out of nothing, a free lunch!
It is a phenomenon that I have come to notice on the TV channel 9XM – the video of a song starts being beamed down perhaps a couple of months ahead of the scheduled opening of the movie in which it occurs. For example, Sheila ki … and the more recent Ooh, la, la …. The US Air Force will be much proud of the effective carpet bombing!
But, here is the hitch. Even before the film is released the song almost becomes passé. That is why I started seeing remix of Sheila ki … and Ooh, la, la … even before the movies were shown in movie halls. That is, the carpet bombing was too effective! And, the remix, invariably for me at least, does not match up to the original, even if it be in tackiness!
I am not going to claim that MTV type videos are arts. But then, what else are these, as they definitely are not science? Within the science v. arts perspective, it is better that song videos fall under arts, much as that may dismay arts connoisseurs!
I may be able to apply some salve to the tortured souls of arts aficionados. When I was growing up I was compelled to listen to Carnatic music, vocals by M S Subbulakshmi, M L Vansathakumari, Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar, D K Pattammal, Chemmangudi Sreenivasa Iyer, Ariyakkudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Madurai Mani Iyer and other such greats (it is a pity I was deaf to music then and things have not gotten better). I knew then that there will be heated arguments among the cognoscenti that a particular song is best sung by ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C” – “You have to hear this sung by XXX to truly enjoy it.” Perhaps that is arts appreciation at a high level.
Yet, that same distinction among the renderings of a song by different people makes Carnatic music not unequal to the remixes of cinema songs! Ouch, that must hurt. But, truth is truth. The same arguments extend to dance, between proponents of any particular type or between types.
Let us take our epics. The recent controversy of the different versions of Ramayana is my focus here. Prof. Ramanujan refused to tag the Valmiki version as the original and the others, derivatives. He called them “retellings”. Obviously, you see the parallels between “retellings”, “renderings” and “remixes”. If we term the Gita as religious art (poems), only today I read that a Siberian court will hear arguments on whether the Gita advocates ‘extremist violence’! Interpretation gone bonkers, you say! I do not disagree, because art is interpretation.
Now, there may be any number of commentaries, interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays and other outputs. But, no one tries to rewrite his plays. True, there are theater productions that contextualize them to today’s world. They may be akin to “retellings”, at best. It is a perpetual argument on who was better as Hamlet: Olivier or Gielgud? No one “renders” a Picasso, like people working on digital movies! They interpret and reinterpret a Picasso. History is becoming more like art because it gets interpreted and reinterpreted, sometimes by the same folks.
All of the above was on arts. Let me turn my gaze to science. Science is interpreted through mathematics. While there are revisions galore in science, there are no “retellings”, no “reinterpretations”, no “renderings”, no “remixes”.
Newton was thought right but has been proven wrong, not just in gravity but also in the corpuscular theory of light. But nobody is mourning Newton’s death (interpreted any which way). Einstein is still going strong but for how long, we do not know. Peter Higgs (and five others) stuck out their neck in their predictions and the boson is becoming less elusive, as per recent reports. The double helix of Watson and Crick have been extended in ways those two could not have imagined. Now, they have been shown to be incompletely correct. There is no “retelling” of double helix. Layers upon layers of complexities are unraveled from within Darwin’s theory of evolution, but no “renderings”. The chemical periodic table has remains immutable, at least so far.
Science is science because of what it lacks: “remixes”, “retellings”, “Reinterpretations”, “renderings” and other “re”s except “revisions”, “rejections”.
I know nothing of arts and on science, I am perhaps a tiny bit better. Yet, my next-to-nothing knowledge has helped me bring this lunch to my table.
Well, I have had my fill of the free lunch.
Raghuram Ekambaram
2 comments:
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Raghuram,
Art is a world apart from Sheila ki jawani. You know it when you say that MTV releases are not art. They are examples of popular music. For example, there is a world of difference between Chetan Bhagat and Amitav Ghosh, both living novelists, the former a best seller and the latter a good seller. The latter is an artist and the former is not.
Where do we draw the line between the two? Not popularity, obviously. Popularity is merely a measure of the contemporary culture. Hollowness marks that culture and that’s perhaps why you are facing the problem that your blog seems to project. Much of these remixing and retelling is all about selling, not arts.
Art captures the soul. I love a quote from Galilee: “The Bible teaches how to go to heaven; science teaches how the heavens go.” He said that when he was put under the Inquisition guillotine. [Don’t take me literally and say that Inquisition and the guillotine belonged to two different ages and civilisations – this is also art!]
Einstein will also be forgotten sooner or later, a few decades (or centuries) after science outgrows him. But Shakespeare will continue to live! Simply because man loves his soul – that immaterial core, illusion, whatever you may consider it .
Yet I must tell you that Shakespeare had a lot of popular vulgarity in his plays. For example, he compared the sinking ship in The Tempest to an “unstanched wench” (a menstruating girl)!
I would disagree with you matheikal ... Shakespeare too will go, sometime or the other ... no one knows who scratched all those cave arts that must have been highly venerated in the days of those creations ... No one knows who did the Stonehenge, a combination scientist-artist? There is enough doubt about who Thiruvalluvar was, even to the extent of doubting his existence!
I do not see a whole lot of difference between what is called Sringara rasa and Sheila ki ... You cannot subscribe to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and then validate only some select eyes! A coquettish eye flutter is as much art as an angry, glowing stare.
Science continuously outgrows itself ... no one remembers the phlogiston theory of heat (even science historians are forgetting it!) ... it continuously forgets itself and sometimes resurrects itself ... the difference between science and art is this: science is science, though for convenience, and convenience only, we say Newtonian and Einsteinian; but art comes with a name tag and nothing more, not an identity. This is the point I made with the list of Carnatic music exponents of high order.
Science is eternal because it allows itself to be ephemeral. Art is lacking this quality.
RE
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