This weekend I read A Brief History of Time (1988), by Stephen Hawking.  Without fail, any time I read lucid, non-specialist writing about cosmology or theoretical physics, I am temporarily struck by the same feeling: most art looks pale, and the pursuit of knowing art seems merely sportive.  Although I spend a lot of time pursuing what I hope will one day be a fluent knowledge of art and art history, the feeling, while it lasts, isn’t depressing;  “istigkeit”, the 12th century German theologian Meister Eckhart might have called it: neither agreeable nor disagreeable – just is.

The same day I came across a passage from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception, in which he describes a somewhat similar feeling about art in the face of the cosmos.  I am interested to know what you readers think.

“I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art…. (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.” — Aldous Huxley

Since this is a visual art site, it seems appropriate to add this image of Carl Sagan and Frank Drake’s ‘artwork’, the Pioneer Plaque, an image intended to represent all of humanity and human knowledge to other forms of sentient life, placed aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1972.