What Art Can Teach Us About Perspective and What Perspective Can Teach Us About How We Order Our World

Art, in a sense, is not reality, but an interpretation of reality.  The same theme or subject can be depicted in an entirely different manner depending on the artist.  Likewise, an artist’s rendering can help shape the viewers perspective as well.  There are not many truths in art, just different techniques and perspectives.  For instance, Vincent Van Gogh’s impasto technique, with its thick application of paint, heavy brush strokes, and vibrant color scheme, can create a sense of movement and three-dimensional effect, where none exists.  This can be appreciated in Starry Night, his 1889 abstract painting of a landscape scene.

George Seurat, in his acclaimed work Sunday on La Grande Jatte, painted in 1884 and depicting an outing along the Seine River, uses another technique, called pointillism, to play with our perspective.  Viewed up close, we see dozens of small, seemingly random painted dots crowding the canvas and whose collective shape appears amorphous, but take a few steps back, and you can see objects begin to take shape.  For instance, in the mid-ground of La Grande Jatte, Seurat depicts a woman holding hands with a small child, but there is also an unidentifiable rust-stained blot of paint hovering above the woman’s head.  Take a few more steps back and you can see it’s an umbrella the woman is holding to keep out the sun. We change our perspective by moving back and reinterpret the same image in a different way and things begin to make sense.   

The Parthenon is considered a masterpiece of ancient Greek architecture and remains a symbol of classical civilization.  It was built between 447 and 432 BC and designed by Ictinus, with help from Callicrates, and dedicated to the goddess Athena. The designers were concerned that, when viewed from the city of Athens, far below the elevated Acropolis, the edges of the building appeared to be sagging under the weight of the structure.  This was an illusion.  As a result, they had the Doric columns on each end of the colonnade constructed wider than the other columns to remove this illusory perspective.  The building did not sag of course; it just looked that way.

The classic painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, painted in 1533, illustrates another example of perspective.  A distorted skull appears stretched across the center-bottom of the painting, but when viewed in person from the upper left or the lower right side of the painting, it springs to life in 3-D mode.  This technique is called anamorphosis.  In anamorphosis, an image is created that can only be seen properly from a particular angle or when using special equipment such as a curved mirror.  The technique is a cogent reminder that perception depends on your vantage point.  

Michelangelo’s classic The David, sculpted between 1501 and 1504, is a colossal Italian Renaissance statue standing a surprising 17 feet tall.  Michelangelo purposely made the head and hands of The David larger, out of proportion to the rest of the body, thus making the figure look proportionate when viewed from his intended perspective, which was from below.

In the case of the famous Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci from 1503 to 1506, the subjects apparent smile seems to disappear when looking directly at her mouth and reappear when focusing the eyes on other parts of her face.  Furthermore, if viewing the Mona Lisa from a left sided vantage point, she appears to be looking directly at us. If we step to the right of the painting, she also appears to be looking directly at us.  We cannot seem to escape her gaze no matter where we are situated in relation to the painting.  This is seemingly impossible in the real world.  One is either looking one way or the other but can’t be looking in both directions at the same time.  We can see again, the way we understand things can change with our perspective.

One may think a photograph may be closer to finding the truth of a scene then a painting, but photos can also be manipulated to yield a far different twist on reality.  The Salar de Uyuni, also known as the Bolivian Salt Flats, is part of the Altiplano Mountain Range and rests at 12,500 feet above sea level.  The area encompasses roughly 10,000 square kilometers and, in the dry season, unique, perspective photographs can be taken, as there is no background to give one a sense of perception, only the limitless horizon.  A photographer can lay on the ground and direct one person to stand in the foreground several feet in front of him and raise one leg off the ground, threatening a stomping motion with the raised foot.  The photographer then nestles a larger group some 50 feet away in the background and asks that group to cooperate by raising their hands in the air, pretending to ward off the foot of a giant preparing to step down on them.  The lack of background perspective provides a perfect opportunity to construct a scene involving a giant malevolent foot threatening to stomp a bunch of innocent pilgrims travelling the salt flat as shown in the photograph below, with perspective manipulated by the photographer to create an illusory affect. 

So now we understand perspective as it pertains to the world of art, but let’s see if we can apply the same concept to obtain a clearer understanding of the way man perceives the world around him. 

Just as art can challenge our perspective, so can circumstances in real life.  What we perceive as truth, is, in fact, an interpretation based on our own reality.  One country’s terrorist is another country’s freedom fighter, or hero, correct?  Same individual or act, different perspectives. Consider a car accident witnessed by two different people, one standing on the north side of the street and one standing on the south side. They see the same event but come to very different conclusions of what happened and who is at fault, based on their individual perspectives, and utilizing data from their sense organs: their eyes, ears, nose, and tactile proprioceptors.  How can that be?  Is one of them lying?  No, each of them saw the same event but from different perspectives and drew different conclusions. Each of them is convinced their version is the truth.

Our view of the world, and thus our beliefs, is determined by our individual perspective, and perspective often has no absolute truth.  Physics, however, can have absolute truth.  If Sir Isaac Newton, sitting comfortably under an apple tree (on Earth), is bonked on the head by a falling apple, we know that apple will always fall at 9.80 meters/second/squared.  It’s an absolute truth.  (Someone dropping an apple on the moon may have a different result).  Physics, however, cannot help us digest the news stories and events of everyday life.  For instance, if a woman walks down the corridor, and she is attractive to you but not your friend, is your friend wrong?  Are you wrong?  Who is right?  Physics can’t clarify that issue.  The answer depends on our own individual tastes that make up our own unique perspective.  

The human brain is a complex organ that we are only just beginning to understand.  It is the outer space of the human body, the last frontier.  Much of its magic remains yet to be discovered.  The brain contains billions of neurons.  The cell bodies of these neurons make up the cerebral cortex.  The entirety of the cerebral cortex makes up what we consider our mind, or our consciousness.  The cerebral cortex is the analytical portion of our brain.  It assimilates information from our senses and transmits impulses that categorize the information as to truth, importance, and relevance.  You cannot point to one part of the brain and say, “There is our consciousness.”  Our consciousness is an abstract, ill-defined concept.  Our subconsciousness controls the bodily functions of our organs.  Because it is below the level of our consciousness, it allows us to continue breathing when we sleep.  We don’t have to think about the act of breathing.  It’s automatic. It is a more primitive layer of the brain and has no analytical powers.  Any information that seeps into our subconsciousness our brain considers as the absolute truth, be it right or wrong, and our subconscious, like our consciousness, can be tied to powerful emotions.  If we are attacked, unless we can control our emotions or are specifically trained in these situations, it is our subconscious mind that will respond on a primeval level, on reflex. We are drawing on instinct, for the most part, rather than analysis.   

Our conscious mind processes information as to believability, importance, and truth.  Our conscious mind favors order.  The way this information is processed, is how we form opinions.  These opinions are constructed through neural circuits that are stored in a databank and are sometimes linked to powerful emotional centers of the brain, such as the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus, among others.  These opinions can be difficult to change if they are linked to these visceral emotive areas because it makes it difficult to re-analyze the root information without triggering the emotion connected to it.  Cable news and other news media outlets rely on this difficulty.  They often dangle stories with a biased, one-sided perspective and stoke the fires within by presenting emotional images or rousing narrative that makes an objective re-analysis of our previously formed opinions difficult or impossible.  

In its quest for order, our mind tries to avoid reprocessing information it has already categorized, even if the information came from knowingly biased sources.  In this sense, our brain is lazy, it likes to keep information and opinions we’ve already formed, the same.  For instance, how difficult is it to start liking someone you have already decided that you dislike?  That’s a difficult opinion to change.  Everything you subsequently learn about that person will be tainted by a very negative perception.  Our brain is too busy processing additional information coming through our senses and into our neural circuits, then to revisit old impulses it has already made a judgement on.  Furthermore, if our sources of information are consistently of the same slant, opinions are never re-worked but are instead further cemented.  In cable media and typical news media, the product is not news and events like one would suspect, the product is you, the audience, and it delivers you directly to the golden alter of the advertising world.  

The media’s job is only to keep you coming back for more.  They shape your opinions depending on how they report the story and are constantly reinforcing them, so when you want to feel secure about the world, when you want to reinforce your perspective, you tune in, and when you tune in, you are then subject to advertisers.  This is the real goal of the media, not to deliver the news, but to get traffic for its advertising partners.  And what better way to get you coming back than to reinforce the same themes and perspectives so you can feel validated about your perception of the world around you.  Gone are the days of who, what, why, where and when.  Most stories, especially social and political in nature, are told with an overt bias directed by the political leanings of that news station, or newspaper.  Our minds seek safety in this world of spin, thus shutting out fresh information or different perspectives on the same topic.  When something threatens to change the existing organization of our mind, we feel anxiety and resistance, as this threatens to destabilize our world.  In the end, we tend to want to keep the same perspective.  

Our mind is a master at organizing information, such as thoughts, ideas, likes and dislikes, truths and falsehood’s, things of importance or non-importance.  Sorting out this information is a way for our mind to create order out of chaos.  Picture a mailman in the post office trying to sort letters from a conveyer belt as fast as he can, because he knows the conveyer belt will never stop and the mail will continue to pile up.  It is likely he will put some of this mail in the wrong slot, given the speed at which he is working, his task also complicated by his interpretation of the poor handwriting on the face of some of the letters, (most of which were written by doctors).  Our minds process information in the same fashion, to some extent.  We must make snap judgements on loads of material coming through our sense organs, and the source of the information may be spoiled with bias. 

With that in mind, how can we really know the conclusions we are making are accurate?  Some of the incoming information we classify in our brain as true, may be false, and some of what we classify as false may actually be true.  Some conclusions are undoubtedly going into the wrong cubbyhole, souring our perspective, but it’s still the best system we have despite the pitfalls.  This process acts as a compass so we can define who we are and what we stand for.  It gives us identify, makes us feel more secure, it steadies our understanding of the events and situations in the world around us.  But it is a false sense of security, an imperfect one, as not all the cubbyholes are filled in with accurate objective information free of bias.

Our perspectives are also affected by the opinions and complex social structure of society.  For instance, Jews were persecuted in Nazi Germany before World War Two driven by an intense propaganda machine designed to convince the German public that Jews were sub-human and were responsible for most of Germany’s problems.  This campaign, dastardly conceived and applied over a long period of time, began to affect the perspective of many Germans. What they previously knew to be false or morally wrong started to become unclear.  Information continued to be distorted, and perspective began to be changed.  

We try to order our world but unless we are talking about absolutes, such as math and physics, much of it is perspective.  Is the earth flat or round?  It appears flat in everyday life, we can all agree.  We never get the feeling we are always walking downhill, do we?  Anyone who has ever driven across the Great Plains knows it is hundreds of miles of unchanging, flat terrain.  If, however, you are sitting on a small cliff, say, in Palos Verdes, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, you can start to see a gentle curve evident on the horizon where the ocean meets the sky.  It was this curve that fortified the belief of intrepid sailors like Columbus and Magellan that the world was round, that they wouldn’t fall off the edge if they ventured into uncharted ocean.  In fact, they had a feeling that going in one direction would lead them right back to where they started from.  They comforted their minds with their perspective, gaining strength when others thought them mad.  

Only individual, societal, and religious perspective can decide the truth behind certain parts of history, such as the Holy Wars, a war for the right to exist between the Muslim nations of the world and the Christian nations, the winner to decide who the real religion was and in so doing, wipe the other off the face of the Earth.  This was a war of different perspectives.  Likewise, when people heard Covid started in a wet market, they were reluctant to move to a lab leak theory.  The latter were just conspiracy nuts, even though common sense would say, “What a coincidence, there just happens to be a virology institute that studies Corona Virus in the exact vicinity of the wet market in question.”  When experts roundly denied that possibility, those cubby holes were sealed off from further input.  Dissenters were labeled whackos and nutjobs and “against science.” Overturning that mindset would threaten to destabilize our knowledge, and thus our order, and thus our world. It’s just the way our minds work.

We, as individuals, do not like to disassemble things our mind has already ordered.  It tries to resist anything that threatens the integrity of the world we have worked so tirelessly to structure through our perceptive reasoning. What are your chances of success in trying to convert someone who is a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan that his opinion on racial superiority is incorrect? 

As a final example, let’s look at the disease known as Kuru.  Kuru affected members of the Fore tribe in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea.  Observing ritualistic cannibalism, members of the tribe would eat the brains of deceased family members, some of whom were infected with the prion that leads to the neurodegenerative disease known as Kuru.  Women and children took part in this funerary ritual, where brain and other body tissues were cooked and consumed after death, to help free the spirit of the deceased loved one and allow them to live on in the bodies of those who consumed them. Australian patrol officers who were charged with administering the Papua New Guinea Highlands tried to break the inhabitants of this bizarre practice, even before it was discovered that the ritual was causing the Kuru, a disease characterized by tremor, slurred speech, inappropriate bursts of laughter, ataxia, myoclonus, dementia and, finally, death.  To the Australian patrol officers, the practice was barbaric.  It was their job to bring about change and civilization to the stone-age peoples of the Highlands, something that ultimately took decades to achieve.  To the villagers, however, this was an act of love, to cannibalize the dead, something that was a normal and regular part of their society, and done for a perfectly good reason, to free the spirit from the body.  Two different perspectives, both with a strong sense that their perspective was right. 

It is often said that art imitates life and life imitates art, and you can see how this may be true. Art reveals, distorts and plays with perspective, just like our beliefs in the world are colored by our perspective.  So, while we think we know and understand the world around us, and thus can interpret things with clarity and objectivity, let’s remember, it all depends on our perspective.  Art can teach us about perspective and help us see things through more than just a black and white lens.  If we understand this, we can begin to make our minds pliable to different ideas, opinions, and perspectives, allowing us to open-up and communicate with greater ease and effectiveness, especially if we realize the other person is also truly listening with an open mind.  We must embrace the idea that our perspective is not always right, even though if feels right to us.  Art can help remind us of this important abstract idea.  If we can achieve this ideal, then the world will surely become a better, happier place for all of us, and thus the phrase, “One for all, and all for one.”