Friday, June 3, 2011

RESPONSE: Art and Science

I love the title on this New York Times article on the World Science Festival: A Double Helix of Art and Science:

The panel is one of 50 events at the five-day World Science Festival, the annual smooch-fest between science and art. The festival began on Wednesday night at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with a gala reading of Alan Alda’s play “Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie,” about that Nobel Prize winner, who, as a widow, was pilloried for having an affair with an unhappily married man who had been her husband’s student.


There aren't nearly enough connections between the arts and scientists. The stereotype of left-brain / right-brain divisions between the two is not great. I'm not talking about plays about sciences (although that's not a bad idea either, is it, Michael Frayn?), I'm talking about actually using arts and sciences together. I recently spotlit one artist bridging art and technology; I think there's more that could be done taking arts to sciences, or sciences to art.

I take a lot of artistic inspiration and ideas from WNYC's Radiolab. I can't help but get artistically inspired by Neil Degrasse Tyson. The creativity and interest in how science and human life actually interacts that some of these scientific ambassadors bring is something we should reflect and bring to them.

(P.S. This post took longer to write than I expected because I googled something related to it and found a whole bunch of cool-sounding science podcasts. Science here I come!)