Today...

The good professor Paul Rangell was talking today about how the sciences get more funding, more attention, more respect. They get the shiny new buildings and more pay for their professors.

He was saying that they do the important stuff, the curing diseases, and the discovering new technologies, blah, blah, blah. But the amount of work we do, he says, that's the same. That's not the important part, though. The part I thought about was the part where art was not as important as science. It is.

They create things, we create ideas. We, the artists, tell people what to think. As advertisers, we tell people what they want, as designers, we tell people what is beautiful. A large group of people is only a civilization once they have art. Artists are important, because we define importance. What would NASA be without all the alien movies, without Ray Bradbury?

I often have this arguement with my sister, she studied chemistry. I tell her, you create something, you scientists, and we, those who control the cutlure will decide how to use it, will the person who created it be seen as an icon or a monster?