"TANGLED AND HIEROGLYPHIC BEAUTY"

Art vs. Science: Matthew Barney's a bore; the Hubble Space Telescope's a blast (Brendan Bernhard, 6/20/03, LA Weekly)

The poet W.H. Auden once said that hanging out with scientists made him feel like a shabby curate. Or like a witch doctor at a
convention of neurosurgeons--I forget the exact wording. But I recalled the remark while watching a recent 60 Minutes segment on the Hubble Space Telescope in which Dr. Mario Livio, who heads up Hubble's science division, told reporter Ed Bradley that the images of the solar system produced by the telescope "are in some sense the most fantastic artworks of our time."

While it's doubtful that Dr. Livio is correct in his assessment--close up, the universe has an unfortunate tendency to look like bad psychedelia--it was fascinating to hear what he and the other scientists had to say. And I couldn't help comparing this with the boredom, verging on stupefaction, I'd experienced a month earlier while watching Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, interview the conceptual artist Matthew Barney on WNET (The Cremaster Cycle: A Conversation With Matthew Barney). And this, mind you, coming from a person so unscientific that he was asked to give up chemistry, physics, biology and math in school. For the teachers' sake. They simply couldn't take it anymore.

Why is the conversation of "cutting-edge" artists so often dull and insipid?

Is there a better understood issue than the way artists' envy of scientists has led to the decline of art?

Meanwhile, the scientists don't appear to get it either: art is our paltry attempt to represent Creation. Merely photographing Creation, while it adds to our appreciation, is cheating. The telescope itself is the work of art. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2003 5:00 PM