Art, Science and Stupidity

It remains a mystery to me as to the constant argument between the Arts and Sciences as to which is more complex and/or important. The defenders of science argue that art is a load of pretentious bullshit aimed at making a lot of hype out of very little at all while the bastions of apparent creativity hold their noses in the air and scoff at just how materialistic science can be. In short, it's fanboyism amongst academia.

And really it's fucking stupid either way.

To begin with the people who are best in either field have abilities considered intrinsic to the others. Artists who demonstrate an analytical approach to their work (whether they're assonate or not) require scientific skills for the questioning of information and interpretation while scientists need to be creative in their thinking when it comes to the connections between different ideas and how to get from A to B in the ideas themselves. Scientists also need to be articulate in order to express their ideas to a wider audience. Artists need to understand the how of their medium. It all meshes together and trying to tear things off from other things is essentially no different to segregating genders just because they're different.

I would say that a lot of this debate comes back to pure stubborn tradition as they sidle around the middle ground which some professions, such as architecture, engineering design and the like, dance upon. To truly bridge the gap would mean not only admitting it didn't need to be made in the first place but would see each group validate the other and would naturally remove much ground for humour about just how snooty they can be. Here's looking at you XKCD.

For myself, I'm of both scientific and artistic traits. It's lots of fun to have that background and helps me to connect dots that just leap out of concepts. In many ways it comes into the idea of multiple learning styles, or multiple intelligences. This way of looking at things as people having a range of skills rather than segregating them off to be little science or arts nerds makes so much more sense. As a species we'd be much better off should these two areas interract more, and get over themselves.