Look at Brunelleschi painter sculptor engineer and architect Universities complain that they cannot attract the talent base into science that the country needs, while the arts faculties are bursting with would-be changers of the world order. In some ways, art has tried to find its way back to science ever since from the Cubists, the fascination of the machine by the Futurists and the mathematical dimensions of Schoenberg.We live in a divided world. Not just between rich and poor, East versus West; science, economics and business sit on one side, art, emotions and personal values on the other. As the artist was no longer required to represent reality, many took to challenging and deconstructing it. From the Romantic poets onwards, the artist paid heed not to numbers, but to his own soul The rest was mere machinery. Even though by the Victorian age the high walls between arts and science were beginning to appear, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, in creating the 1851 Great Exhibition and its legacy in the museums in South Kensington, brought scientists, engineers, artists and designers together to celebrate Britain's global interests. Perhaps the Millennium Dome, padlocked and decaying at Greenwich, is a fitting image of the dysfunctionality between arts and science in our century.As science charged forward over the past 200 years, the arts appeared to rebel against the profusion of the new technologies. But today the 21st century learned societies seem shadows of their former selves, locked in their respective silos of thought and endeavour. Neil MacGregor, the new director of the British Museum, sees the establishment of the museum in 1753 as one of, if not the greatest example of the Enlightenment in these islands, where intellect, science, discovery and the imagination came together. These 18th-century foundations - which included the strangely named Lunar Society - saw no boundaries between the arts and sciences. The traditional designation of "natural philosopher" was replaced with the word "scientist".But, curiously, the Enlightenment also saw the creation of the learned societies where artists, patrons, businessmen and scientists met and debated the great subjects, ideas and discoveries that were to transform the world. Some people point to the Enlightenment, when knowledge moved out of the studio and into the laboratory. Indeed, many of them would make very challenging chairs of the Arts Council. But where have all the artists who are also scientists gone - are the likes of Da Vinci just one offs? There has been a rupture between science and the arts in modern times, indeed between the arts and many aspects of society, and all the video installations in the world cannot repair it.
Scientists such as Copernicus and Pasteur were skilled artists; Einstein and Schweitzer were both renowned musicians.The Dutch Nobel prize-winner Jacob van't Hoff said: "The most innovative scientists are almost always artists, musicians or poets." But is it still true today, in the first decade of the 21st century? There are some distinguished scientists who are very appreciative and knowledgeable about the arts. Look at Brunelleschi, painter, sculptor, engineer and architect. Books are written on Leonardo da Vinci's scientific discoveries alone D? and Morris were both artists and scientists. The Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance or Enlightenment creator could be a skilled craftsman, philosopher, painter, sculptor, architect and scientist. In fact they are inseparable." Throughout history artists and scientists, like artists and business people, did not have separate social and intellectual worlds. But is it? Paul Val?, the French Symbolist poet, said "Science and arts are crude names, in rough opposition. Science is seen as left brain - logical and analytical - the arts as right brain - the source of intuition and imagination. |
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