Art Theory: Is there a difference between the scientist and the artist?

There is apparently a lot of misunderstanding about art and artists on Quora, so hopefully this answer is useful to the community's scientists, engineers, and other left-brained users who might view art as mysterious, frivolous, or nonconstructive. There are many, many kinds of artists, but the the most important difference between artists and scientists is that artists do not use the scientific method. This means that artists can work from untestable hypotheses. They are not bound to reality or limited by their observations, and can instead choose to work from conceptual foundations which are imagined, abstract, or are otherwise irrational. While this way of working is awful for engineering airplanes, exploring the cosmos, or explaining the origin of man, it is crucial for inventing airplanes, imagining how the cosmos might be explored, and inspiring man to question his origins. Art is very good at asking questions about our world, but not so great at answering them. Likewise, the scientific method is our most efficient tool for answering questions about reality, but it is not self-guiding. Artists use the luxury of abstraction to guide thought, find connections between unrelated things, and describe possibilities. They create new ways of looking at and thinking about the world which can then inspire science to bring those ideas to life. Another way of saying this is that artists create demand for things which have never existed, and which could not have been arrived at by testable hypotheses. Artists teach society how to think in new ways, scientists do the thinking, and society benefits. The interaction between artists and scientists is both ancient, current, and really interesting. A few examples follow: It can be argued that the entire chemical revolution was initiated and driven by the need to produce artists' pigments, from ancient alchemists burning iron to produce whites, blacks, and umbers, to modern synthetic chemistry's origins in the production of cheap alternatives to expensive natural pigments for dyes and paints (see the history of French Ultramarine). Jules Verne could not test whether a submarine would sink, but that didn't stop him from imagining a world where it did not, and science followed. Your cell phone displays information by using an artistic innovation, the  "flat rectangle that tricks the eye into thinking it is looking at something else," which is so common today that it is easy to forget how unusual it is. And hey, you even hold your phone in Landscape or Portrait mode, reflecting an abstract connection artists made long ago between the type of visual data presented and the shape of the display media. So really, if you happen to be an artist, you could learn a lot from science; and if you're a scientist, you could learn a lot from art.

Artists' criteria for...

It's only relatively recently that there's been a distinction between the two disciplines. Possibly it occurred with the rise of the idea of the bohemian artist and the rational scientist in the early - mid 1800s. Certainly, in the Renaissance people were both (Leonardo etc.). Even today, there are plenty of intersections between the two disciplines: the best scientists are enormously creative, and I suspect the best artists can be enormously scientific (they try to understand the world; they try new things, they fail, they try something else, they succeed) even if they'd deny it.

This is a very long quote but addresses a link between science and art (or objectivity and subjectivity) via Mondrian's work: Mondrian had explained..."that he did not work with instruments nor through analysis, but by means of intuition and the eye. He tests each picture over a long period by eye: it is a physical adjustment of proportion through training, intuition and testing." To this can be added... "Mondrian’s painting method, which he called 'pure intuition,' was the direct approach, by trial and error, to the given space of the canvas. There were no a priori measure of any kind, there was no "golden section." He also called it "pure sensuality.” In the light of Mondrian’s writings, which continually stress the importance of objectivity and precision, such statements can seem disappointing... The contradiction is resolved only when we grasp the full extent of the dialectic involved. Within the context of traditional pictorial syntax, the intuitive perception of the artist functions as a vaguely defined subjectivity operating in relation to a highly defined and objective overall controlling system, that pictorial “language” which finds its culmination in scientific perspective. With Mondrian, not only is any such system opposed, but all the factors contributing to this opposition are ultimately reduced and clarified to the point that their guiding principle can be evaluated directly and completely by eye. In such a context, intuitive perception functions objectively and with precision. Source: Victor Grauer, Dialectic or Essence I think all great artists had what I would call a "project" -- some question or issue that they were interested in. The only way then to understand if you are making progress with this is to pose a hypothesis (e.g., Picasso & Braque: what happens if we remove the single viewpoint and paint an object and space as if it were viewed from multiple points?). While there is a lot of intuition at work some constants must be in place to progress the work. Often this is what results in someone's style (think of Pollock, Monet, Newman, Bacon, Matisse, Scully, Marden). Each of these styles evolve slowly over time and it is not a matter of "liking'"or "not liking" this or that form, technique or colour.

A nice quote from the 1970's cult book, Zen - and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  "At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts ... thin art ... because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue."

Both seek truth, but scientists are committed to making decisions one at a time, so they can validate each one. Artists make multiple decisions at a time - it's called intuition - and they don't care about justifying each step.

Neil Davidson is on to something I think. Artists used to be the lead researchers in the scientific fields. I. Relieve this may be linked to the goal of art to represent the works in as realistic a manner possible. Artists needed to closely study something in irder to illustrate it believably. Today art is generally not concerned with this. Art is more concerned with expressing, embodying and exploring ideas. Artists are more closely linked with philosophers and less interested in observation. So today I would argue scientists are observers and researchers while artists are more speculative.

Although their methodologies may differ, both respectively pursue their own inspiration. Both operate as agents in a material world which both restricts them and liberates them. If the field of inquiry is too broad and open and the artist/scientist is restricted solely by his or her imagination then their work will remain insubstantial in the virtual world of ideas. If the work is initiated in the material world, the dictates of that world delimit the effective potential of the work. The material will thrust barriers in your way as soon as you take it up, listen carefully to what it can teach as you study it.

Scientist pursue knowledge using the scientific method, trying to reach a theory and using reproducibility of results as a path. Artists use tools developed by scientists (computers, paint, mechanical tools, etc..) and knowledge about how to use it to get the results they envision, but their method is personal and can be structured or completely chaotic.