Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art

that the hero of cognitivism is still David Marr, who never sought to understand human vision directly but instead to develop machine vision. In an enlightening discussion, Pizzo Russo discusses the works of Howard Gardner and points out the way in which his thinking frustrates the placement of artistic thought in any mainstream context. Gardner, who posited the existence of numerous intelligences, effectively created a barrier of commonality between scientific and artistic intelligence. The way that a basic notion of intelligence is translated through various media—preserving a common definition of intelligence while at the same time respecting the difference of its manifestation—is instead captured in Arnheim’s idea of representational development. This preserves general notions of intelligence that only find a particular manifestation in artistic products. Ironically, a psychology of art turns out to be an eminently general psychology of cognition. Pizzo Russo’s reflections on mental imagery in Chapter Three are equally negative, noting as they do the Pyrrhic victory of the imagists over the symbolists. According to Pizzo Russo, Philip Johnson-Laird, for example, insists so vehemently that his mental models are not visual that the possibility of a final overcoming of symbolism is impossible. The chapter on color stands quite well alone and treats several issues facing those interested in art and psychology. This book is the fruit of many years work at the intersection of art and science. Working in the Italian tradition, Pizzo Russo does not have to worry about the American feel-good narrative of the “Mind’s New Science” of cognitivism. If we have learned so much about the mind, why is our understanding of art so poor? The ideology of mainstream psychological science accords Arnheim a respected position, but only historically. Perhaps if cognitivism is a true science, we will have to remember with Newton that a science is built on the shoulders of giants.