Blinded: Modern Art, Astronomy, and the Lost Sky

摘要

For today's casual visual observer, the night sky has become lost. Pollution, light glare, and the constructed environment have created a blindness through which the night sky is only imperfectly seen, when seen at all. Can the night sky, then, still inspire art if it has become invisible? In this paper, I would like to explore the question of the inspiration of the night sky in the absence of direct observation. In particular, I suggest that the absence of the visual night sky has forced artists to consider the problems of representing an "invisible" subject from nature. The implications of this "invisible" sky are not just a matter of stylistic expression, but also of cultural interpretation.