When it comes to art (considered broadly, so as to include literature and various kinds of performance, not to mention a good bottle of wine) I am a radical subjectivist. If you like it, great; if you don't, that's your prerogative. There is no such thing as being "right" or "wrong" in one's opinion about a work of art; what's important is the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it. Nevertheless, there's no question that one's attitude toward a work of art can be radically changed by outside information or experiences. You might come to understand it better, or conversely you might be overexposed to it and just get bored. Scientists, in particular, love it when they discover that some boring old art thing that they had previously perceived as undifferentiated and uninteresting actually possesses some hidden structure. If you were ever caught in the unfortunate situation of teaching an art- or film-appreciation class to scientists, the right strategy would be to reveal, insofar as possible, the underlying theories by which the work in question is constructed. And if you think there are no such theories, you're just not looking hard enough. Recent examples, which I would blog about in extraordinary depth and breathtaking insight (with a dash of self-deprecating humor) if I were a professional blogger rather than a scientist with a blogging hobby:
Patrick House in Slate reveals the algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Involves concepts such as the "theory of mind" joke. (Via 3QD.) As far as I know, there is not yet an algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.
The Science of Scriptwriting! This one actually appeared on the arxiv, under the more formal title "The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts." (Via Swans on Tea and the physics arxiv blog.)
Relatedly, back in March Jennifer was serving as the Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, and ran a series of Friday workshops. One of them was Inside the Writer's Room: Where Physics and Hollywood Collide, featuring guest speakers David Saltzberg and David Grae. David #1 is a physicist at UCLA and also the science consultant for the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which I will write about someday, I promise. David #2 is a TV scriptwriter, who was there to tell the physicists how to write for TV. About which maybe also more, someday, but right now I just wanted to highlight one phenomenon: when David was talking about possible plot lines and characters, the physicists played along and seemed mildly interested. But when he revealed that an hour-long TV drama is inevitably broken up into specific acts, each of which generally (in the case of each show) has a particular function within the larger narrative, the room lit up. There was a theory of TV dramas! More than one person said they would never be able to watch prime-time television in quite the same way again.
Also, of course, the assembled physicists all had a similar question: "Why don't they make a TV show about me, or someone like me? Those people are all nerds!" I have a theory about that.
