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. . . Art has something in the
nature of an inferential
mechanism, which constitutes the ground on which move all the theories
of mathematical sciences, physics, and those of living beings. Indeed,
the games of proportions reducible to games of numbers and metrics in architecture,
literature, music, painting, theater, dance and so on—games of continuity,
of proximity, in- or outside of time, of topologic essence—are all made
on the terrain of the inference, in the strict logical sense. Besides this
terrain exists the experimental mode that challenges or confirms the theories
created by the sciences, including mathematics. Since the development of
non-Euclidean geometries and the theorem of Gödel, mathematics has
also proven to be an experimental science, but over a longer time span
than the other sciences. The experiment makes and breaks theories, without
pity and without consideration for them. Now, the arts are also governed,
in a manner still more rich and complex, by the experimental mode. Indeed
there are not, and without a doubt never will be, objective criteria for
absolute and eternal truths of validity of a work of art, just as no scientific
“truth” is definite. But in addition to these two
modes of activity—inferential
and experimental—art lives in a third, that of immediate
revelation
that is neither inferential nor experimental. The revelation of beauty
is made at once, directly, to the person ignorant of art just as to the
connoisseur. Revelation makes the force of art and, it seems, its superiority
over the sciences because, living in the two dimensions of the inferential
and experimental, art possesses this third possibility, the most mysterious
of all, the one that makes the objects of art escape any aesthetic science
all the while indulging in the caresses of the inferential and the experimental.
Iannis Xenakis
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