Art/Science Confluence

"gently_jib"

Two stories from today's New York Times hint at the possibility that someday the distinction between art and science will prove as capricious and past-tense as the Ingres/Delacroix line-versus-color battle or the Modernist abstraction-versus-realism debate:

Physicists discover/conjure/perceive new elements:

(F)or roughly half a century, nuclear scientists have been searching for an elusive "island of stability," somewhere among the superheavies, in which long-lived elements with new chemical properties might exist. Dr. Loveland said that the new results indicated that scientists might be closing in on that island.

"We're sort of in the shoals of the island of stability," said Dr. Kenton J. Moody, a Livermore nuclear physicist who was one of the experimenters in the work.

"It's an amazing effect," he added. "We're really just chipping away at the edges of it."

-snip-

"This is a working piece of art," Dr. Patin said. "We're not done yet. Nothing's been finished. What it could really mean down the road, nobody can tell. And that's the part that's exciting to me."

In a periodic table of another sort, artist Vincent Desiderio, with exhaustive thoroughness and care, paints the elements of six centuries of Western art. The Times' article contains the following contemplation-worthy notion:

Of all the illustrations, (Desiderio) found (the) Picasso portrait, "Leaning Woman" (1939), the most difficult image to reproduce because "Picasso's marks are so aggressively counter-intuitive."

Scientist/Artist...how anything ever got bifurcated in the first place is what I find counter-intuitive.

Posted by mark at February 1, 2004 03:54 PM