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Photograph: August Wieselmayer |
The Nobel prize winning neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel used
sea slugs to study memory. Of course Freud’s early work had been with
eels and as everyone knows eel makes for very delicious sushi. Kandel’s
latest book
The Age of Insight, deals
with Klimt, Koskoshka and Schiele, artists who Kandel describes as
“uncovering unconscious mental processes in
their drawing and painting in parallel with Sigmund Freud and Arthur
Schnitzler, who were doing so in their writing.” In commenting on the ideas that he deals with in the book, in the summer issue of
Columbia
Magazine, Kandel makes the following statement: “We even have an idea of why
people fall in love with works of arts. What accounts for Ronald Lauder’s
paying $135 million in 2006 for Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the
painting on the dust jacket of
The Age of
Insight?” Kandel goes on to remark that the “love of art involves a number
of brain systems, but it particularly involves the brain chemical dopamine…The
dopaminergic system is recruited for love, for addiction, for food, for sex.”
Dopamine and love make sense, but the love of art? The statement actually makes
one think about the work of another Austrian whose work came much later than
the artists Kandel cites and that’s the photographer Thomas Struth. Struth took a classic series of photographs of
Prado visitors looking at Velasquez’s Las Meninas.
Generally, the FMRI is recruited to study dopaminergic reactions.
But the FMRI only tells us what part of the
brain is affected by x,y or z emotions. When you look at Struth photograph of a visitor to the Prado or other museums like
the State Hermitage, you may conclude that art is more revealing about the relation of esthetics to emotion than
science can ever be. Stanley Kubrick once made a movie about trying to
understand the mind. Based on Schnitzler’s
Traumnovelle,
he cannily titled it
Eyes Wide Shut.
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