Art appreciation isn't a strength of mine, yet I've been to many galleries around the world tagging behind my art teacher wife. On the weekend we visited the NSW Art Gallery for the Monet exhibition with some friends. In fact this year I've had impressionist overload as we were also at D'Orsay in Paris earlier this year, so I know now that Manet isn't just a typo on the Monet program. Anyway its always interesting to listen to art lovers commenting on what they are looking at, sounding far more educated than I ever will. One fellow was commenting to his fiend that he thought the artist he was observing was probably painting off a photo. My arty wife who knows a lot about art (as far as I can tell) scoffed and said to me that that artist lived way before cameras were even invented!
This got me thinking about what life was like before photos and now the instant gratification of digital photography. I could imagine that painters would have been in high demand for accurately capturing a scene for prosperity. In fact I would expect that the skill of the painter may have been judged by the detail and accuracy of the reproduction. It seems that the impressionists were the renegades and didn't seem to paint accuratey at all...in fact tried to communicate more than an accurate reproduction of a scene, but to also communicate a deeper meaning of what they were observing (am I starting to sound arty :) ) Anyway, so what has this got to do with SNA. Well lately I have been doing a number of validation sessions with clients for some SNA work I am doing. Its always an exciting time in an SNA project when the first maps come up. My clients are always anxious to get an early look and tend to pour over them with the sort of enthusiasm that you might see at the opening of a Monet exhibition! They know the people in the maps and therefore their intrigue is always more than mine, as I try to be the objective observer and warn against over-interpretation etc.. That said the context that the SNA observers bring will differ depending on their own knowledge of the people in the maps, so the discussion is usually animated and lively. My observations by not knowing the people is usually clinical in terms of central connectors, brokers, structural equivalence etc... As scientists we often warn against reading too much into the numbers. But could this always be true with an SNA map interpretation? Typically what we call a validation session could equally be called a sensemaking session. Often I will observe people finding reinforcement of their perceptions in the maps, but also surprise that some expected patterns not being there. So getting back to the topic ... what I tend to observe when people gather around an SNA map for the first time, is not unlike the people that gather around an impressionist piece of art.
Now I can't claim any real insight in terms of SNA and art as the connection has been made many times in the past. In fact several years ago I was visiting
Valdis Krebs in Cleveland at a time when
Mark Lombardi's hand drawn SNA maps were doing a tour of the art galleries and just happened to be in Cleveland at that time. Valdis and myself spent a number of hours admiring his art work and watching a video on how he went about his business of creating his somewhat intriguing and controversial money laundering maps. Now I can't speak for Valdis, but I think a Lombardi exhibition beats a Monet one any day!
