Art

Abstract

When such a new and powerful institution as science arrives upon the social scene, there is nothing in the whole culture immune to its effects. The enterprise we should expect to feel it least, if at all, is art. We would be wrong. For art is no exception: the artist knows, even though he may not wish to admit it, that he cannot hope to compete with the brilliance of the recent discoveries in physics and biology. The result is that he hates and fears science and thinks of himself as working apart from it and even in opposition to it. Yet because he lives in a period in western culture dominated by it, he remains under its influence, and he might be surprised to learn how much it has determined what he does.