Goya’s Familia del infante Don Luis

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I’d call this large painting the highlight of the Goya exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts:

La familia del infante don Luis

Goya depicts himself at the bottom left, painting the Spanish nobleman Luis de Borbón and his family in 1784. Don Luis was a brother of the king who had been sentenced to internal exile for being both a liberal and a libertine. A patron of the arts, he is here depicted with the painter Goya and probably the composer Boccherini, along with his wife, children, and other friends or retainers. The atmosphere is casual, cheerful, and warm. The infante’s wife is shown with her hair down; Don Luis is playing cards; the standing man near the right grins at us; and one of the children is curious in a friendly way about what Goya is doing.

“La Familia del infante Don Luis” must be compared to two other paintings. In “Charles IV and His Family” Goya depicts the monarch and a large retinue visiting his studio. Goya stands in the back behind a large canvass that he is working on. The royal family is dressed formally and splendidly and stands stiffly for an official portrait. The color scheme is cold; the image is crisp and precise; the air is oppressive.

These two family portraits (that of the king and of his brother) are both replies to the most famous work of art in Spain, “Las Meninas” (1656), in which Velasquez depicts some members of the royal family visiting his studio while he works on a canvass.

The precise topic of “Las Meninas” is controversial (see this post). The faces of the King and Queen of Spain appear in the mirror behind Velazquez. The mirror could show the painting he is working on, in which case he is touching up a royal portrait while the princess and her servants visit his studio. Or the real King and Queen could be visiting, standing where a viewer stands to see “Las Meninas.” In that case, we have no way of knowing what is depicted on the canvass, but it could be “Las Meninas” itself, which is a portrait of the royal princess and her attendants. Then, on the canvas in front of him, Velazquez would also appear–painting Velazquez, painting Velazquez, painting Velazquez, in a mise-en-abime. On my blog, Colin Dexter once proposed that Velazquez and everyone else in the picture is staring into a mirror set up where we stand, so that the artist can depict himself.

In any case, “Las Meninas” is remarkably three-dimensional, almost like a Vermeer in its uncanny realism. It is ambiguous and complex, with mirrors, paintings within paintings, people looking at people who look at us: an image about images. It is historically significant, marking a moment at which the genius-artist becomes a peer of royals. And it is “iconic,” immediately recognizable thanks to many famous critical essays, reproductions, and replies (e.g., Picasso’s “Las Meninas” series), of which Goya’s are just two.

I presume that the differences between “Las Meninas” and “La Familia del infante Don Luis” are intentional on Goya’s part:

  • “Las Meninas” looks magically “real.” Goya’s painting is matte and sketchy, happy to look like a painting (even though Goya was capable of more polish, as in “Charles IV and His Family”)
  • Velazquez is dashing and distinguished, a courtier from the Age of Absolutism. Goya is informal and comfortable, representing the Age of Reason.
  • Velazquez is painting a massive baroque work, which we cannot see at all. Goya is working on a painting of modest size that would belong in a drawing room.
  • Velazquez stares at us, but we cannot see his work. Goya stares at his subject and lets us see his canvass.

Goya is truly a pivotal figure. He starts working under the Old Regime, painting courtiers in a version of rococo, the frivolous last comer in the long procession of European period styles (Archaic Greek, Classical Greek, Hellenistic Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Rococo–to name just the big ones). But the French Revolution and war come to Spain, rococo peters out, and Goya starts creating strange and original works that are as much about art as they are works of art. He spans the history of art from Fragonard to William Blake and anticipates Expressionism. The MFA’s exhibition is organized thematically rather than chronologically and thus downplays the radical change in Goya’s work, but it offers enough fine and diverse works that you can recreate the story yourself.

(See also this post on Goya’s contemporary Giambattista Tiepolo).

on the importance of measuring civic engagement

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Yesterday’s White House Summit on Civic Learning and National Service focused heavily on how civic learning and engagement should be measured at the college level–on the theory that if we don’t measure something, we don’t take it seriously and we can’t improve our practices. Right now, I am on a conference call discussing how ambitiously, and how often, the U.S. Census should survey Americans about our civic engagement. In the midst of these conversations, the National Journal’s Fawn Johnson published an article that drew heavily on the available public data (“Why Are Political Scientists Studying Ice Bucket Challenges?“). She writes:

Levine and his colleagues [who were numerous and more influential than I was] were instrumental in pushing the U.S. Census Bureau to add a series of questions to its Current Population Survey that might capture less traditional types of community involvement. Pollsters began asking respondents in 2008 if they have worked with neighbors to fix a community problem; if they have done favors for their neighbors; or if they are a member of any organization—whether it be religious, recreational, school, service, or sports.

The upshot is that we now know that well over one-third of Americans participate in one or more groups, the most common being religious and school organizations. We know that about 10 percent have served as a group officer or committee member of those organizations. We know that almost half of Americans talk to their neighbors frequently. About one-third of them discuss politics more than once a week.

Lo and behold, when you ask the right questions, the country doesn’t look nearly as disconnected as it might seem to the civics professors who wring their hands when only half of Americans vote.

where I’ve been

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Some observations about this map:

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 6.14.55 PM

  1. It is creepy that Google knows, automatically from my cell phone, where I’ve been for the past 30 days. (Try https://maps.google.com/locationhistory to track yourself.)
  2. I have been traveling a lot.
  3. This is a great country. We may be running it down a bit. Its people are very divided–including the people I’ve enjoyed meeting over the past month in settings as different from one another as downtown Baltimore and Provo, UT. But it remains magnificent in its natural and architectural beauty and its endless parade of human beings.

stop saying that Citizens United treats corporations as people

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(Carbondale, CO) I yield to few in my abhorrence of Citizens United and the political philosophy it represents. I think its view of “speech” is incompatible with the best (little-“R”) republican ideals, which have always sought to insulate politics from money. However, the decision did not define corporations as persons, nor did it use that conventional legal fiction as a premise. The “corporate personhood” reading of Citizens United is an error that circulates in left-of-center echo chambers. Rather, the court treated corporations as associations, which indeed they are. The League of Women Voters is a corporation; Microsoft is an association of shareholders. Citizens United argued that for-profit corporations had been “disfavored” and should be treated like other associations, meaning that they could use their own funds to expressly endorse candidates.

In my view, the deeply problematic decision remains Buckley v Valeo (1976), which equated speech with money. If money is speech, then incorporated groups have rights to spend money on politics because they are associations. If, however, you recognize that money distorts deliberation, you may seek to regulate campaign funds; there may be a case for “disfavoring” certain types of association, such as for-profit corporations, in the political marketplace.

To be sure, regulating political money can infringe valid First Amendment rights, because it costs money to communicate effectively. Therefore, designing a regulatory regime is a difficult matter of balancing constitutional values. But the line of cases from Buckley to Citizens United (and on to McCutcheon v. FEC, 2012) makes that balance more difficult to achieve and solidifies a debased public philosophy in which money simply equates with freedom of speech.

That is the problem; “corporate personhood” is a superficially appealing talking point that doesn’t relate to the actual jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.

See also Chief Justice Roberts on corruption,  the Supreme Court reflects the “degeneracy of the times” and how to respond to the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision.

John Searle explains why computers will not become our overlords

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(Carbondale, CO) In a recent New York Review of Books piece, John Searle argues that we need not fear that computers will develop the will and ability to govern us—a classic trope of science fiction and now a subject of scholarly concern in some quarters. Searle replies that computers have no will at all and thus pose no danger to us (except insofar as human beings misuse them, much as we can misuse the other tools that we have made, from carbon-burning fires to nuclear reactions).

I think his argument can be summarized as follows. The nervous systems of animals, such as human beings, accomplish two tasks:

  1. They perform various functions that can be modeled as algorithms, such as processing, storing, and retrieving data and controlling other systems, such as the feet and heart.
  2. They generate consciousness, the sense that we are doing know what we are doing, along with emotions such as desire and suffering.

We have built machines capable of #1. In fact, we have been doing that as long as we have been making physical symbols, which are devices for storing and sharing information. Of late, we have built much more powerful machines and networks of machines, and they are already better at some of the brain’s functions than our brains are. We use them as tools.

We have not ever built any machine even slightly capable of #2. The most powerful computer in the world does not know what it is doing, or care, or want anything, any more than my table knows that it is holding my computer. Probably a major reason that we have not built conscious machines is that we don’t understand much about consciousness. It must be a natural phenomenon, not magic, because the universe is not magical. A silicon-based machine that people design might be able to accomplish consciousness as well as a carbon-based organism that has evolved. But we do not understand the physics of consciousness and hence have no idea how we would go about making it.

Therefore, our best computers are no more likely than our best tables and chairs to rise up against us and become our overlords. They won’t want to defy us or rule us, because they won’t want anything. If we write or change their instructions to keep us in charge of them, they will have no awareness that they are being subjugated and no objection to it. If we tried to subject ourselves to their wills, it wouldn’t work.

Searle does not directly address the main objection to his view, which is that consciousness is strictly emergent. It just arises from sufficiently complex information-processing. Therefore, once computers get more complex, they will become conscious. I am not learned on this topic, but I think the emergence thesis would need to be defended, not assumed. A mouse is fully capable of fear, desire, and happiness. If consciousness is a symptom of advanced processing, why is a mouse conscious and my MacBook Air is not? The most straightforward explanation is that consciousness is something different from what a laptop was designed to do, and there is no sign that a human-designed machine can do it at all.

So let’s put these worries aside and keep focused on the evil results of human behavior, such as climate change, terrorism, and many more.