Charlie Chaplin to Albert Einstein, condensing the essential difference between the explanatory nature of art, which in its best iterations is broadly intelligible as a timeless form of humanism and empathy, and the explanatory nature of science, which means the most to scientists and exists almost solely in the present, discarding its past as it refines and improves itself. Art does not get better and better; science does. The arts should speak to all; science should not concern itself with public comprehension.
The triumph of science over art, and over most forms of meaning-making, in the discourse of our recent past comes down to this, mainly: we are increasingly technocratic, and cheer scientists as enablers of the technology that replace culture (while purporting to purvey it), and we are decreasingly artistic, and in any event can no longer understand the deliberately arcane art created by overly self-referential performers.
We are perhaps also less interested in what art has to tell us: how we are humans like all the rest before us, with the same detestable and laudable qualities, the same hopes and fears, and the same fates. We’d rather the epochal distinction science confers: we are different, cleaner, longer-lived, more precise, soberer, faster, wiser, more enlightened, better, better, better than those bloody dead idiots before us.
