”One always has to spoil a picture a little bit”

Dave Soldier once created in Thailand an orchestra of 16 elephants. He built elephantine versions of drums, xylophones, a sort of single-string bass, and gongs and bells and marimbas, all tuned to a C-sharp pentatonic scale. Then he put the instruments before the animals and recorded their extemporaneous percussive music — archly titled Smash Hits by the Thai Elephant Orchestra — and, without revealing its name or origin or the jumbo session musicians, played some of it for a New York Times music critic. The critic identified the music as Asian. He did not identify it as played by elephants.

“Dave Soldier” is a nom de musique. His real name is David Sulzer and he is a respected neuroscientist at Columbia University, where his lab studies the dopamine system, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, schizophrenia, autism, and drug addiction. In the last few years, the boundary between his music life and his neuroscience life has become porous. He’s been investigating how the brain processes music, with a side interest in what animals seem to make of melody and harmony and rhythm. And so the pachyderm project.

Burkhardt Bilger of The New Yorker wrote about Sulzer in 2023. This passage, from when Bilger observed Sulzer teaching a university class, got my attention:

When the synthesizer down the hall was first invented, Sulzer told his class, the sounds it produced were too mathematically perfect to be musical. “A pure sine wave is just so damn boring,” he said. “They had to build circuits to dirty it up.” A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. … Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

Substitute “art” for “music” and the last statement loses nothing: “Art, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.” 

To consider an object or performance as art, our minds first have to sense order, pattern, the influence of one part on another, and, above all, skill directed by intent. I also think we desire the sense that our eyes, ears, or minds are being quietly, subtly guided along some kind of path. We momentarily surrender some free will to the artist. We are drawn to motion, even the faintest evidence of motion in the brushstrokes and color gradient of a Mark Rothko canvas. Stasis is off-putting. If we lose the sense that a novel is “going somewhere,” we quit on it. I think we want to feel a creative mind in action that says, Follow me.

We are still fascinated by, and often admire, the symmetrical, the seamless, the identical, and the pure. There’s beauty in the perfectly joined cabinet, the flawless diamond, the pure black of crow feathers, the sleek engineering of an iPhone, the symmetry of a Palladian villa — we are drawn to them all for good reason. Order isn’t just pleasing to the eye. There’s something reassuring about it, something comforting and secure. We want our dishware to match, the duvet to be smooth, and the pictures on the living room wall to be level. 

But when the tone is pure, the line flawless, the color field uniform, the beat on the beat every beat, the work feels cold and impersonal and the mind has nowhere further to go. There’s no ambiguity to resolve. No inconsistency to ponder. No meaning to tease out because everything about the perfect object is there on the surface. Speaking metaphorically, holding the perfect object up to the light and turning it about will reveal nothing new or unexpected.

From a mathematical standpoint, a circle embodies a mysterious paradox. It exhibits perfect symmetry, but its mathematical foundation, π, is an irrational number that runs forever and exhibits no pattern, at least not in the billions of digits studied so far. Pi fascinates some of us because of its unfathomable irregularity, but the visual product of pi, a scribed circle on paper, is static. A nearly circular line drawn by hand, in which the endpoint misses the start point? That’s the beginning of a vortex. It has motion and mystery and it pulls in the viewer. It’s interesting in a way a circle will never be.

Our brains judge a face with proportional, symmetrical features as pretty. A face with those same features but a slightly misaligned eye or a subtle crook in the smile will be arresting. It is not for nothing that we call a single well-placed dark spot on the cheek a beauty mark; a symmetrical mark on the other cheek would just look artificial and strange.

The Japanese have thought about this a lot. The concept of wabi-sabi is more subtle and complex than the common sense of its meaning, with deep roots in Buddhism, but integral to the aesthetic is imperfection, irregular natural texture, asymmetry, and the incorporation of flaws. On the other side of the world, Edmund Burke argued that geometric perfection was inert. He appreciated the beauty to be found in the perfect, but thought it closed off a deeper, more emotionally complex experience that might be prompted by something ambiguous, inconsistent, and unsettling. Nineteenth-century German romantics valorized ancient ruins, and fragments of other kinds. Friedrich Schlegel went so far as to argue for the superiority of a fragment over the completed work; he believed a finished work closed off the observer’s imagination and engagement. I’ve sometimes wondered if certain pieces of art turned out so well and entranced my imagination because the artist didn’t so much finish them as just stopped working and put them out into the world as if finished, for everyone else to complete.

I have searched in vain for something I’ve long believed Delacroix wrote in one of his journals: “In every great painting there’s a bit of bad drawing.” Ignore the quotation marks: that’s a paraphrase of a sentence that may not even exist. I don’t know why I’m so sure the painter wrote it, and I’m probably just wrong. But he did write, “One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.” And he wrote: “When the proportions are too perfect, it detracts from a sense of the sublime.” And, best of all, “Cold exactitude is not art.” 

Within the artist, I believe, there is constant tension between expressiveness and craft, between the intentional and the accidental, between the conviction of long practice and I dunno, I’m not sure about this part here but I’ll leave it in for now. Craft, our inner pilot developed over years of practice, admonishes us like a navigation app, Proceed to the route, but we wander off anyway because we’ve glimpsed something new on a tangent. It might be nothing, it might be a thicket or a tar pit, but strap in because that’s where we’re going.

No part of the human body can move the exact same way twice. Not a dancer’s feet, not a painter’s hand, not an actor’s face, not the singer’s vocal cords. And asking an artist’s mind not to run off the road is like asking a cat to juggle. The handmade nature of the thing guarantees imperfection, impurity, something not quite right, something unforeseen, something bent, something that wandered off without asking. I no longer notice the beauty of my iPhone’s design. I find something new and arresting in an Andrew Wyeth painting every time I look at it. 

My father painted signs. Now and then he painted showcards that announced who was appearing at a nightclub: Three Nights Only Fri-Sat-Sun: The Ramsey Lewis Trio. He had a fine design sensibility and was a superb calligrapher with a brush. Just his distinctive lettering was enough to attract attention and deliver the message. But sometimes he’d embellish the card with a scattering of little starbursts. I’m sure the club thought they were festive ornamentation, but I knew better. I knew that when he was almost done, he’d put a thumbprint or a drop of moisture on the card, and rather than toss it and start over, had covered his mistake with a starburst. Add a few more and they looked deliberate — the goof became a design element, the bug a feature. I admired his extraordinary, flawless script and marveled at his skill with a brush. But I loved the cards with the little devices, the stars or the snowflakes or the champagne bubbles, because there I saw all of my dad: his artistry, his craftsmanship, his fallibility. And his occasional sleight-of-hand to avoid eating some of his profit from a job.