Credit: JOHN GOODBY

A fluid definition of art

When does an image made by a researcher for scientific purposes become art — if at all? Over the ages, the beauty of scientific images has been widely recognized. Reading Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) gives us a sense of his aesthetic thrill faced with the wondrous images in the new device of the microscope. Like many of his contemporaries, Hooke would have recognized such miracles as the eye of the fly as the product of God's, or nature's, artistry. But does this mean that they are works of art in the normal sense of the term?

The question is implicitly raised by many of the striking products of modern scientific imaging techniques. And it is overtly posed by the claims of chemist John Goodby of the University of Hull, UK, that his microscopic images of liquid crystals (shown here) are “every bit as good as the kind of art you see in most galleries”. Leaving aside the question of what is meant by “good” (and good for what?), his decision to start exhibiting his pictures as works of art plays into a complex series of shifting definitions of art in the modern era.

Until the twentieth century, the issue would not have arisen within the institutionalized definitions of art and science in post-Renaissance Western culture. But when artists decided to display everyday objects in art galleries — such as the signed urinal entitled Fountain by Marcel Duchamp in 1917 — the definition of art became very wobbly. The exhibiting of such ‘ready-mades’ and their enshrining in galleries and museums, in the collection of Duchamp's works in Philadelphia, for example, leaves us with a definition that extends little beyond the claim that anything is art that an artist claims is art — as is anything that viewers can look at as art.

Goodby's claims are of course more specific than merely saying that because he exhibits the liquid-crystal pictures as art, then they are art. He is implicitly setting his images in the context of modernist abstraction, in which paintings or sculptures are devoid of figurative subject matter and narratives. Indeed, the way that the great masters of abstraction have transformed what we are prepared to consider as art has radically enhanced our ability to appreciate the marvellous natural configurations revealed by modern scientific techniques.

The amount of artistic contrivance in Goodby's images far exceeds that in Duchamp's urinal. The selection of certain liquid crystals at certain stages in their intermediate state between solid and liquid, the setting up of the microscope to deliver certain visual qualities, and the choices involved in rendering and printing the pictures (regarding colours, textures, plasticity, scale and framing, for example) are all done to create the best effect. This is to say nothing of the way Goodby collages his images to produce images of birds and flowers.

I wonder how many scientists who use visual images prominently in publishing their work have not made some kind of aesthetic choice at some time or other. Certainly anything that features on the cover of Nature, in its current format, is designed to attract attention in ways that are comparable to the use of a painting on the cover of an art journal.

In the final analysis, should we worry about whether something is art or not? If it excites us, isn't that enough? My answer is drawn from a long historical perspective. The set definition of art as an aesthetic product devoid of practical function is actually comparatively recent (dating back to the late eighteenth century) and is limited to Western and Westernized societies. The art world has performed increasingly unconvincing conceptual gymnastics to accommodate everything that artists have recently thrown at it. If we stop being bothered by the question of whether something is art, and instead respond openly to the visual products that we are capable of making, we will be able both to agree with Goodby that his works are as ‘good’ as art, and say that any implicit competition between artists and scientist as makers of wonderful images is rather beside the point.