Walker, and others like him (because there always are others), were known as filibusteros in Spanish, filibusters in English, which means pirate or freebooter—men who weilded weapons under the guise or control of no nation, for their own personal gain (gives a whole new meaning to Congressional filibusters, doesn’t it?).

What struck me most is that a figure essential to the make up of Costa Rican national identity is virtually unknown in the US, at least he was completely unknown to me and the other Americans I’ve spoken to about him since. And I couldn’t help further wondering what such a figurehead must mean to the shaping of a Costa Rican understanding of US citizens. But then again, look at how so many Americans proudly proclaim themselves anglophiles after that little bit of history we call the Revolutionary War. Which really just got me thinking about a lot of other things. But rather than try to summarize those thoughts myself, I will borrow from a book by an American journalist that I picked up in a tiny used bookshop while on a brief stop in the beach town of Jaco about her year spent in Central Asia:

Imagining the lives of others is an essential human instinct. It is an act of empathy, a gesture of faith in a common bond. It is also a kind of travel, an attempt to move outside the parameters of our own narrow universe. But it almost always fails. Once we pick up and go—once we cross the borders, physical and intellectual, political and emotional, that divide countries and continents—we come to realize that we’re not merely imagining. We’re projecting. And if we’re honest with ourselves about that, we at least see the truths, or at least the puzzles and muddles in which they are buried.
—So Many Enemies, So Little Time, Elinor Burkett

• So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All teh Wrong Places, Elinor Burkett (I picked this up in a tiny beachside used bookshop in Costa Rica and wouldn’t let it go. A smart, tough, and fascinating discussion of what it means to be an American abroad and one of the most interesting post-Sept. 11 writings that I’ve read.)
• On Michael Jackson, Margo Jefferson (I hear Jefferson speak on a panel and was eager to read her book. There’s some very interesting thinking in here about America’s relationship with the so-called “freak” that would be worth expanding on.)
• I Married You For Happiness, Lily Tuck (Beautifully written and very well constructed. This book was excellent.)
• Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn (Some of the cynical and problematic ways they tell their stories get in the way of a strong and important message. Nevertheless, it was illuminating and it’s hard to read without wanting to take some action.)
• The Challenge for Africa, Wangari Maathai (A compelling argument, beyond her other arguments and viewpoints, that true change can only come from within.)
• Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx (Read will in residence in the woods upstate—an literary escape while away from home.)
• Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, Gabrielle Hamilton (My best friend sent me this book. It is many things, but the two most worth nothing are it’s detailed look behind a few curtains I’ve never peeked behind before, and the willfulness of the writer.)
• Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, Kathleen Dean Moore (This book is so thoughtful and beautiful in so many ways. I picked this up at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, while brooding one day about how much I missed being in the woods. This book is so much more than “nature writing”—it’s comprised of observation, philosophy, lived experience, and serious inquiry. I admire the writer tremendously.)
• Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Hans Abbing (I think Abbing is too focused in this book on the products of artistic practice, specifically on the sale of visual art works, which causes the book to be too limited in its approach to figuring out the economy of the arts. That said, it’s a great beginning to a discussion that I think it only just getting warmed up.)
• World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on performance, place and politics, Peter Dickinson (A dense and far-reaching collection of scholarly essays that raises some serious questions about the nomadic nature of art that hopes to enlighten and inspire change being presented to people, who, inevitably, bring with them their local and personal experience.)
• Common As Air, Lewis Hyde (This book coalesces so much thinking so elegantly around issues related to intellectual property and the progress that ideas offer our society. Should be read by many.)
• The Next American Revolution, Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige (Cannot recommend this book enough. Read it.)
• The Radiance of the King, Camara Laye (A bit long, but a fascinating journey.)
• Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, Todd London & Ben Pesner (If you are in the theater you really must read this. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to it.)
• Thinking Like An Editor, Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato (Great advice for someone looking for it.)
• A Heart as Wide as the World: Stories on the Path to Lovingkindness, Sharon Salzberg (I’m just at the beginning of dipping my toes into Buddhism and this is my first foray. A very worthy one.)
• One Hundred Demons, Lynda Barry (A wonderful attempt at exorcism.)
• Harriet Chalmers Adams: Adventurer and Explorer, Second Edition, Durlynn Anema (Sad to think such a fascinating woman is largely lost in history, but such is the case with so many women.)
• West With the Night, Beryl Markham (Funny to me that this book is listed so often in lists of great travel books, when, in fact, it’s very much an ode to the country she called home for most of her life. It’s really only listed as a travel book because the presumption is that the reader has never been to Markham’s home.)
• Critical Play: Radical Game Design, Mary Flanagan (Recommonded by a friend—a great overview of games in art, in the broadest sense, that then taps into contemporary software-based gaming culture. Interesting that she also has an agenda in this book to radicalize gaming.)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell (A wonderfully engrossing read for cold New York nights. There’s so much too this book.)
• Inferno, Eileen Myles (Fantastic journey. I read it twice. To learn to live, to work, and to love—I should be so lucky to know all three.)
• Role Models, John Water (This book was more than a few pleasures to read—an intellectual pleasure, an ethical and philosophical pleasure, a guilty pleasure, and on and on. Waters’ self-awareness, his openness with himself and with others, his artistic integrity, and his humanity are remarkably present in this book. I had no idea. And now I love him.)
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, David Eagleman (Read this because I kept hearing about it from so many sources. In the end, I felt like the heavily moralistic overtones and the very anthropocentric view of most of the tales were kinda grating. Less soapbox, more imagination, I say. And kinda thought the one scenario where God was a lady was a little lame. Why even bother at that point, and when it’s so hamfisted?)
• Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, William J. Mann (Makes her out to be a conflicted human being rather than an untouchable. Ultimately it reads like there’s a good amount of speculation involved, but a sad true-ish sounding story.)
• A Challenge for the Actor, Uta Hagen (A really great book on the craft of acting.)
• Open, Andre Agassi (This is an incredibly compelling story, told in novelistic detail in the first half. A classic hero’s journey, but with more attention to the arbitrary nature of life’s trials. Just the right thing for a summer read.)
• Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin (This book was not good—a nouveau existentialism that reveals yet another story about a bunch of bored twenty and thirty-somethings who can’t think of anything more interesting to do with their lives than nothing.)
• A Simple Heart, Gustave Flaubert (I’m not entirely sure why I feel such an affinity for Flaubert, but I do. His writing and his perspective are incredibly enticing to me, even when they border on the maudlin.)
• The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, Anna Pavord (A very well-researched and readable book on the history of the development of an idea—taxonomy. Pavord explores the genesis of taxonomy through the lineage of botany, all the while revealing the individuals and historical events that contributed to the development of the naming of names in the plant world.)
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel (I’m struck most by the gyroscopic structure of this book—the way it circles back over the same set of circumstances with a new perspective, but still never gains control over the elements included. A fascinating book.)
• An Education, Lynn Barber (Funny how different the book is from the salacious promises that the back cover touts. I’m glad it is what it is and not what the marketing team attached to it wants it to be.)
• Barf Manifesto, Dodie Bellamy (A difficult work that circles back into itself and the community it concerns quite a bit.)
• Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (I tore through this book. Waters is clearly a very talented storyteller. The predominant thought I have after reading this one is about the prisons we create within ourselves and that we allow or perpetuate around us. Guess I’ll have to read Joe LeDoux’s book soon…)
• Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters (I would think it would be hard not to get sucked in to this book. Enjoyed it too much to think about what clever tricks besides strong storytelling she’s using to carry the reader along.)
• Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert (Not her best work. But she still gets my vote, as she had it from Pilgrims onward. I look forward to her leaving memoir behind.)
• Baby Remember My Name, edited by Michelle Tea (Who doesn’t like a good anthology now and again?)
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (Haven’t read a good page-turner in awhile. Had to stay up late to finish this one.)
• Free Fire Zone, Theresa Rebeck (Picked this up after interviewing Rebeck. So far it’s the best book about the business of writing that I’ve read, with an emphasis on business. Learned and laughed a lot.)
• Martha Quest, Doris Lessing (Will finally have to read The Golden Notebook after reading this.)
• Lucky in the Corner, Carol Anshaw (A book club I was thinking about joining was reading this. Turns out I can’t go to the first meeting and didn’t love this book, but will give it another try.)
• Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman (A jarring reminder that despite my fondest beliefs, our civilization does not tend toward greater tolerance.)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (I was surprised to find that though I didn’t at first imagine myself having much interest in this story, at the end, when I began to think about reinterpreting it, something new entered the story that was exciting—the isolation of perception described here is a powerful and disturbing reality.)
• My Life in France, Julia Child & Alex Prud’Homme (I’m ashamed to say I had no idea how hard she worked. And I love the idea that a bildungsroman could start in the main character’s early thirties.)
• A Wheel Within A Wheel, Frances E. Willard (Too excellent; so much fun.)
• At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, Anne Fadiman (A perfect example of why the essay is one of the most insightful, interesting, flexible, and often unexpected forms.)
• A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert (Subtle, as promised. I can’t help wishing it was a bit richer.)
• First Execution, Domenico Starnone (This book calls a lot of attention to its structure and it’s easy to get lost, but the getting lost did pay off in the end, and my interest in tales of political disillusionment only seems to grow.)
• The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (Just wonderful. And the edition that my mother got for my brother and I as children has the most wonderful illustrations for the story, perfectly pitched, by Michael Hague.)
• Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, Jennifer Scanlon (Scanlon is out to paint a specific portrait of HGB, but it’s a very compelling and very timely one.)
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner (An incredibly well-told story, which weaves in many of the themes and ideas about the role of storytelling in our lives that I’ve been puzzling over lately. A wonderful read.)
• Disquiet, Julia Leigh (Recommended by a friend from work, an excellent, absorbing read, that reminded me of why I always loved to read Poe’s breathless and strange stories.)
• Our Life in Gardens, Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd (Everything I hoped it would be. I padded through it from cover to cover.)
• The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (What great storytelling! And all the dreams of Hollywood dashed. A great book.)
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson (You can really see why Isaacson is such a popular biographer now—it’s a very readable and smooth progression that’s presented here, and a reasonable attempt to paint Franklin as the human he was rather than the caricature we like to imagine him as. It’s been a useful piece of research for my new show.)
• New Grub Street, George Gissing (And the closing chapter in this little triptych on the business of art, or specifically literature—a Victorian literary world trying to reconcile art and commerce as unsuccessfully as they ever have been. It seems like we might actually end up reverting to more of a Victorian model of investors and personal investments in the next century, but who’s to say.)
• Grub, Elise Blackwell (A funny book to read after Hyde’s. It’s amazing how much things refuse to change in certain arenas, but how much we insist that ought to.)
• The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, Lewis Hyde (A wide-ranging book with some interesting conclusions. Like many others I’ve spent a fair amount of time worrying over some of these questions, but I’m not sure yet that there’s an answer. I suppose what Hyde’s book leaves me with is a stronger sense that there likely isn’t a need for an answer to these questions.)
• The Ruins of California, Martha Sherrill (I’d been looking for books about California and my friend Beth brought this one over for me, it was a great start. And how odd for me two novels in a row with juvenile narrators, I’ve been reading so many other things in between this past two novels I didn’t even remember that Hedgehog was the last. Anyhow, a good story, and that satisfaction of a strange view of a country I only think I know.)
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson (The title of this book does it no justice at all. The piece ranges widely, is sharp and incisive, has deeply human characters. And perhaps the most wonderful thing is the shattering lack of sentimentality that the author has for her characters or the world around her. I admire this story a great deal, heart-breaking though it is.)
• Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson (It’s remarkable how aptly so much of Cajal’s advice applies to the artist. And it’s also amazing to see such concise and spot-on advice for scientists that is over 100 years old—the book was originally published in 1897. It’s also clear that this translation makes all the difference.)
• The Encantadas, Herman Melville (It’s imperfect, of course it’s imperfect, the metaphors are occasionally very foggy and sometimes get mixed up, but the richness and density of the imagery in a single one of his sentences is breathtaking.)
• Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert (What a perfect example of my own travails so much of the time…)

“For the creative writer the major problem seems to be to know the patterning of the grain; and these can hardly be discovered in rich color without understanding of the many sequences of the American tradition on the popular side as well as on purely literary levels. The writer must know, as Eliot has said, ‘the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind.’ A favored explanation for the slow and spare development of the arts in America has lain in stress upon the forces of materialism. But these have existed in every civilization; they have even at times seemed to assist the processes of art. The American failure to value the productions of the artist has likewise been cited; but the artist often seems to need less of critical persuasion and sympathy than an unstudied association with his natural inheritance. Many artists have worked supremely well with little encouragement; few have worked without a rich traditional store from which consciously or unconsciously they have drawn. The difficult task of discovering and diffusing the materials of the American tradition—many of them still buried—belongs for the most part to criticism; the artist will steep himself in the gathered light. In the end he may use native sources as a point of radical departure; he may seldom be intent upon early materials; but he will discover a relationship with the many streams of native charactre and feeling. The single writer—the single production—will no longer stand solitary or aggressive but wihtin a natural sequence.”
-Constance Rourke in American Humor: A Study of the National Character

Regardless, I found my way there, first through one of Sharon Salzberg’s books, A Heart as Wide as the World. Though I am still very much at the beginning of what I think will be a much longer journey with Buddhism, I thought I’d write down some of the books that I’ve been reading and have kept off my main reading list, by and large.

I joke with my friends that I often have to go through an intense research phase whenever I take on a new project, a new stage of life, or a new anything. So my somewhat voracious appetite for books on this subject is reflected in this list, given that I’ve been exploring this for such a relatively short period of time. I’m still reading a handful of these as I type this.

• A Beginner’s Guide to Tibetan Buddhism: Notes from a Practitioner’s Journey, Bruce Newman (Bought this after skimming it on a break during a workshop at Tibet House in New York.)

• A Heart as Wide as the World, Sharon Salzberg (The first book that helped, after a lot of dabbling, begin to sink into the idea of this practice.)

• Buddha, Karen Armstrong

• Faith, Sharon Salzberg

• Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein

• Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Sharon Salzberg

• Meditation in Action, Chogyam Trungpa (I have the pocket edition of this and I love it.)

• Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, Tara Brach (Sometimes hers claims of epiphanies and success seem a little overzealous, but the meditations and the ideas themselves were really great, I found.)

• Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, Sharon Salzberg

• Teachings of the Buddha, edited by Jack Kornfield

• True Love, Thich Nhat Hanh

Anyhow, as a fellow I’ll be continuing my arts journalism work and undertake a new book project that I started on late last year. In this book I’ll be examining the ways that the arts are currently valued in the US and suggest an entirely new way of thinking about their value. No small ambitions here either…

Someone I care about very much is in a place that has been characterized by poverty, malnourishment, armed conflict, systematic rape, and years upon years of exploitation and oppression primarily by outsiders. And then there is this—the search for worlds and ideas far beyond ourselves.

This slideshow, combined with things I’ve been writing and thinking about lately, reinforced like nothing else for me that life is vast, beautiful, terrifying, confounding, and utterly incoherent.

Photo: Michael Benson/NASA/European Space Agency - Pictured: Jupter's Moon Europa floating in front of Jupiter's massive "Great Red Spot" storm system

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
—Georges Bataille

“That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.”
—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”
—Gilbert K. Chesterton

I saw the above quote projected during a performance of Kristin Marting et al’s Lush Valley at HERE in September. It’s come up in my mind many times since then.

I took this photograph while in residence at the Millay Colony. It’s a photo peering through a tear in the screen of one of the windows on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s writing cabin, which was locked up and required a fee of $16 dollars to enter. You can just make out the chair and desk where she sat to do her timed writing every morning. It was said that everything inside was left just as it was on the day she died. There are many reasons to be suspicious of this claim.

“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.”
-Susan Sontag

The book, Performa 09: Back to Futurism, was just published and is now available for purchase. My piece is a short document of Anna Halprin’s piece parades & changes, which was re-enacted for Performa 09 after its original production in 1965.

Get a copy of your own. It’s available on all the major online bookstores or directly from Performa (at a discounted price).

You can also buy other books containing my work. Click here for more info.

I found out that I’ve been offer a residency at the Millay Colony for the month of October. This opportunity couldn’t come at a better time. I’m at the start of two major writing projects and will be able to get a great start on them during my time upstate. Also hope to get in a good number of walks in the woods.

“I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect – completely removed in fact – even as we ourselves are.”
-Agnes Martin, excerpted from “Notes,” in Writings (Cantz, 1992)

What

Throughout my life I’ve been interested in the relationship between art and science. It’s come up in a lot of my work, both creative and critical. I’m currently working on a couple of projects that look for ways to align art and science, demonstrating the ability of both fields to increase human knowledge and provide solutions for society’s challenges. I’ll be posting more information here about these projects in the future.

The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.

-Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904),
Russian author, playwright. The professor in
A Boring Story, Works, vol. 7, p. 276,
“Nauka” (1976).

Resources

Organizations/Institutes/Programs/Opportunities

• Art Science Research Lab – founded by Rhonda Roland Shearer and the late Stephen Jay Gould
• Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) – a for-profit group that charges for their bulletins and services
• CUNY Graduate Center, Science & the Arts program
• Dactyl Foundation
• Engineering Arts – for artists who need science or engineering advice
• The Exploratorium
• Hollywood Math – to help screenwriters get the science right in their scripts
• LabLit.com – a webzine focused on science in literature
• Princeton University’s annual Art of Science Competition
• Rhizome.org
• Science-Art.com – for scientific, nature and medical illustrators
• SciTalk – database to pair creative writers with scientists and vice versa
• Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
• STAGE (Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration) – they host an annual playscript competition
• SymbioticA

Funding Bodies

• Blouin Foundation
• Dana Foundation
• National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (UK)
• Sloan Foundation
• Wellcome Trust (UK)

Publications & Other Media

• Edge
• Radio Lab
• Science & the City
• Science Blogs
• Studio 360

People: Critics & Academics

• Martin J. Kemp – a professor a Oxford specializing in Leonardo da Vinci who writes extensively on science and art

Articles & Other Materials or Resources

• When Is “Science on Stage” Really Science?, by Carl Djerassi for American Theatre, Vol. 24 (January 2007), pp. 96-103.
• National Pulic Radio Series: Where Science Meets Art
• Nature magazine’s Science, art and culture archive
• Outline of a ‘Biology for Artists’ course for undergraduates

Quotations

20th Century

What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.
-Robert Musil (1880–1942), Austrian author. The Obscene and Pathological in Art (1911), a polemic against censorship of the arts, and Musil’s first published essay (in the journal Pan). Robert Musil, Precision and Soul. Essays and Addresses, p.9, ed. and trans. by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1990).

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.
-Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), Russian-born U.S. author. The Roving Mind, ch. 25, Prometheus (1983).

Science may be described as the art of systematic over- simplification.
-Karl Popper (b. 1902), AngloAustrian philosopher. quoted in Observer (London, Aug. 1, 1982).

The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!
-Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 1 (1986). From a 1979 commencement address delivered at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
-Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), British philosopher, mathematician. A Free Man’s Worship and Other Essays, ch. 3 (1976).

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
-Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. “The Imagination of Disaster,” Against Interpretation (1966).

Attainment and science, retainment and art—the two couples keep to themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters.
-Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. “Time and Ebb,” Nabokov’s Dozen (1958).

Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.
-Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), German playwright, poet. On Theater, “Little Organon for the Theater,” (1949)

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the “higher life.”
-Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), British author. Ends and Means, ch. 14 (1937).

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
-Paul Valéry (1871–1945), French poet, essayist. repr. In Collected Works, vol. 14, “Analects,” ed. J. Matthews (1970). Moralités (1932).

We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.
-D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Etruscan Places, ch. 4 (1932).

The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world…. The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.
-R.G. (Robin George) Collingwood (1889–1943), British philosopher. “Outlines of a Philosophy of Art,” Essays in the Philosophy of Art, Indiana University Press.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.
-Max Weber (1864–1920), German sociologist. repr. in Essays in Sociology, eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1946). “Science as a Vocation,” (1919).

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.
-Paul Klee (1879–1940), Swiss artist. The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, no. 747, Jan. 1906 entry (1957, trans. 1965).

19th Century

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.
-Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian novelist, philosopher. repr. In Tolstoy on Art, ed. Aylmer Maude (1924). What Is Art? Ch. 10 (1898).

The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.
-Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), Russian author, playwright. The professor in A Boring Story, Works, vol. 7, p. 276, “Nauka.”

Thinking is seeing…. Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
-Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850), French novelist. Also in Le livre mystique, Werdet (1835), and in the Comédie humaine (1845, trans. 1971). Louis Lambert, in Louis Lambert, chapter VI, Notice a sur L. L. in the Nouveaux contes philosophiques (1832).

18th Century

Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.
-Friedrich Von Schiller (1759–1805), German dramatist, poet, essayist. “Eighth Letter,” On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).