Abstraction in a Celestial Palette, Courtesy of Robots and Outer Space
By John Noble Wilford
The New York Times

Published: October 22, 2003

While images of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn filled a giant screen in the
background, speakers ruminated on the topic of interplanetary
photography. It resolves specks of distant light into places of
astonishing form and beauty, it opens the eyes of science to discovery,
but is it art?

Specifically, can pictures taken by spacecraft millions of miles away
from their human masters truly be deemed art?

The occasion was a symposium, "Far Out: The Sublime Photographic Legacy
of the Interplanetary Space Probes," held on Monday at the American
Museum of Natural History and organized by the museum's Hayden
Planetarium and the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York
University.

The inspiration and the pictures on view came from a new book, "Beyond:
Visions of the Interplanetary Probes," a visual tour of the solar
system from the cameras of robotic craft like the Voyagers, Vikings
and Galileo. The book, by the writer and filmmaker Michael Benson, is
to be published next month by Abrams.

At the symposium Dr. Arthur C. Danto, a professor of philosophy at
Columbia, spoke of Kant and his recognition of the power of "starry
heavens above to inspire wonderment and awe."

Dr. Bruce C. Murray, a planetary scientist at the California Institute
of Technology, recalled how stunned he was by Voyager's first pictures
of Jupiter, in 1979, fanciful swirls and filigrees of atmospheric
turbulence and broad, colorful brush strokes of global jet streams.
"They looked to me like abstract art," he said.

As much as they sought to circle the issue, the panelists could not
resist comparisons of the boldest and strangest pictures to abstract
art. They variously brought to mind Georgia O'Keeffe, Salvador Dalí or
Jackson Pollock. The more they talked, the less they worried about
whether pictures by robots could be art.

"Nature is painting these pictures," said Ann Druyan, a writer and
producer of television programs on space and the widow of the
astronomer Carl Sagan.

Joel Meyerowitz, a photographer, said art should be thought of as an
entrance to new experience and insight. "Many times," he said, "I was
stopped by the planetary pictures. I had that gasp reflex, and then I
allowed my mind to wander in through the entrance."

In his book Mr. Benson, who said he entered the pictures of the solar
system through the Internet, wrote that seeing the crescent Neptune
reminded him of a work of art "created by a master toward the end of a
long career."

"There's wintry virtuosity at play, combined with a palpable absence of
any need to show off," he continued. "Gone are the flashy excesses of
Jupiter and Saturn. Its haunting, cantaloupe-skinned moon Triton is
dark and inscrutable. Yet in spite of its deep-frozen state, activity
is noticeable even here: plumes of carbon as black as squid ink emerge
from cracks in its surface."

At one point in the evening several voices from the audience shouted
for the moderator to move aside. He was blocking their view. The
planetary panoramas snapped by machines may or may not be art, but
their evocation of nature's profuse diversity inspired awe and wonder.
The audience members knew they liked what they saw.