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What excites us in seeing art? Let's begin with considering what a dog sees

Written by | Joe Nalven | 12:17 p.m., Dec 16, 2012

I was thinking - always a dangerous enterprise - about my dog watching TV.

Another of my previous dogs found the TV to be a void, but this one waits patiently to see another dog, cat or other object that energizes her dogness.

I also get energized by the TV, but certainly not in the same way. Or so it appears when we watch TV together.

I began to wonder if Hailey (my dog) would appreciate Titian's Boy with Dogs in a Landscape (1565 - 1576) that resides in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Or, perhaps, Hailey wondering about James Henry Beard's He’s Not for Sale (1880) that was auctioned off a few years ago by Doyle New York.

Probably not.

It occurred to others about how other species might see art - or at least how they would perceive other objects that we do. Before there can be art, there must be perception - or is it that conceptual art can exist without being perceived? I will leave that to the conceptual aestheticians to answer.

The New York Times Book Review did a review of Alexandra Horowitz's book, INSIDE OF A DOG What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. The review by Cathleen Schine was titled, Grrr, Sniff, Arf (0/8/2009).

I find the commentary helpful for my wonderings about Hailey and what she sees on TV.

[Alexandra Horowitz] work draws on that of an early-20th-­century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who proposed that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt . . . : their subjective or ‘self-world.’ ” Hard as we may try, a dog’s-eye view is not immediately accessible to us, however, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.

Consider one of Horowitz’s examples: a rose. A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog. How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? “To a dog,” Horowitz points out, “a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, and so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.” Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

Dogs, as anyone who has ever met one knows, sniff a lot. They are, says Horowitz, “creatures of the nose.”

I quite agree. Hailey is far more energized by sniffing when we go walking outdoors than by what she sees on the TV as we watch it together.

If she doesn't see what I do and has a broader range of sniffing than I do, then her aesthetics are skewed. Or is it my aesthetics are skewed. Or perhaps we have a different centrality to our respective aesthetics of the world -- one tilted towards vision, the other towards viewing?

I decided to skim the internet some more. I remembered something about a bee's vision. Here, bees reportedly see more than we do.

Michael Hanlonpenned an interesting article, A bees-eye view: How insects see flowers very differently to us. (8/8/2007)


And as these remarkable pictures show, there is more to many flowers than meets the eye - the human eye at least. Many species, including bees, can see a broader spectrum of light than we can, opening up a whole new world.

The images, taken by Norwegian scientist-cameraman Bjorn Roslett, present a series of flowers in both natural and ultraviolet light, revealing an insect's eye view.

Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis): To the human eye the flower looks solid yellow but insects can aim for the bullseye in the centre.

I assume the bee goes around enjoying the world much as we do. But apparently the bee sees more of the world or sees the objects around us in a broader spectrum of light.

And there are many theories about color vision that considerably expand this brief illustration.

Of course, simply because a bee sees more of light spectrum doesn't mean its aesthetics are "better" than ours. We have elegance and form and composition -- or NOT. Since the advent of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (porcelain urinal), with modern and postmodern art, it seems that human aesthetics may have yielded something in the comparison between how we enjoy beauty and how other species do.

Ahhh, yes. The concept. We have conceptual art. But, as I asked early on in this essay, can there be conceptual art without perception. And if not, how does our perception affect our aesthetics, conceptual or otherwise.

But, then, perhaps conceptual art does not need perception at all. It simply is a reflection upon nothing, nothing at all.

In that case, maybe I'd rather be a bee, or a dog.

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