I am sorry for this delayed response to a recent thread. I often want
to participate but run out of time. Today however... Happy Holidays
"THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE...IS ART?
To answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a
place for the arts."
Thank you for opening this thread for conversation. In many ways I
couldn't agree with this premise more. But I feel the connection can
only be understood when science and art are seen as equals. Equals?
What could that mean?
1. I fear framing the question that "science needs to find a place
for the arts" reiterates a hierarchy between science and art that is
not defensible and that does not lead to a better understanding of
either or how they are related. More importantly it
mis-states the nature of each, their relationship to one another
and the fundamentally different approach they offer for understanding
and living in the world. To be sure the complexity of the
distinction/interconnection between "creatively discovering" and "art
making" should not stop us from trying to understand both without
creating a hierarchy or power struggle between them.
As a starting point (and a gross simplification...)science's
mission is to discover how the world works not create a way for
the world to work.
"Art and artists are more or less given the permission //and// the
responsibility to start anew, to build or create without specific
responsibility for history or precedence. Art as an activity can be as
easily dedicated to the creation of first principles and underlying
assumptions as to the creation of paintings and poetry."
https://www.wkbank.com/knowledge/Civilization_as_an_Art_Form";
More problematic works of art may contain new principles that
science is best able to discover.
Science often progresses by more or less disqualifying and
correcting an earlier understanding and approach. One work of art
regardless of when it was created does not negate or devalue another
work of art. All works of art more or less add to the experience and
understanding of anything.
What may go unnoticed here is that this ability of art to start
anew and of science to follow precedence to some discovery, when
valued and looked at carefully provides a check for and on the
excesses of both science and art. It could be said that art keeps the
human world open and science keeps it from flying apart.
2. By conflating the ARTS (the forms a work of art takes most often
thought of as painting, music, sculpture even new forms...) and ART,
(the generative power, the human faculty-capibility of art making) ART
becomes limited to what is sometimes referred to in Judaic tradition
as commentary.
3. A question remains: what can art create that science cannot and
what can science discover that art cannot? And its corollary at what
turn might art lead and at what turn might science take a first step.
My sense is to create a new civilization as many are trying to do
now we must let art take the lead.
Ann Racuya-Robbins
Founder and CEO
World Knowledge Bank
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