I find myself musing again on the links between Art and Science. No, not the fact that the latest Booker prize winner apparently has an astrological structure, sigh. No, not even The Falling Sky, intriguing blend though it is of academic angst and lesbian lust. No. Umm. Where was I? Oh yes. Art. Grayson Perry has been delivering the first ever cross-dressing Reith Lectures and very fine they are too. Yesterday’s was about how you judge quality in Art, a famously heated topic. (Can you have a heated topic, rather than a heated debate? Ed.)
There is no objective formula. The choices seem to be (a) The Market. (b) The Club – curators, critics and successful artists. (c) Public Opinion. All the tension seems to come from (c) disagreeing with (b). I have always been fascinated by the way folk are not content to just not like something; they get angry with Art. “My Johnny can do better than that” etc. Oh. Right. How come your Johnny ain’t famous then? I saw this in action the previous summer when visiting a Tracey Emin exhibition at the lovely Turner Gallery in my old home town of Margate. (An art gallery! In Margate!!!) Tracey is not quite my cup of tea but I was giving it a go. Suddenly there were staff scurrying around because a small child had drawn on one of the sculptures. The crowd was instantly split into the horrified bourgeoisie and the cheering polloi. Pardon my mongrel language approach.
So. Thats Art. Science? When we try get all philosophically rigorous we also find it really hard to pin down an objective assurance of truth. Cue pub argument about Hume, Popper, Feyerabend etc. But day by day the situation is the opposite. We know in our guts that the whole point of science is the search for objective knowledge, and that we have found a strange paradoxical but reliable method of getting at it; knowledge comes from honest scepticism.
We also take for granted that the arbiters of good science are us gals and guys in the club. (More gals please.) We don’t think the public should vote on whats true and whats not. There is no market in science. You can’t simply proclaim yourself an expert (though some try). There are not even any gentleman amateur scientists any more. You pass your exams, convince an interview panel, take the Government Shilling or the University Penny, expose your work nervously at conferences full of other club members, and try to decide whether you want to play the Herd Member route or the Lone Wolf route. They can both work, as long as you keep publishing, although the latter is a harder trick to pull off.
But public opinion? You will note its called Public Outreach, not Public Insertion. We generously give them the benefit of our wisdom. Oh, but please, do explain again why you personally believe Einstein was wrong because public opinion is very important to us. Yeah, right.