The Ashmolean Museum, 4/28/2019

Art and history are kissing cousins, hand in hand, traipsing through the field of human past. You could argue that there is no real difference between art and history: they are the thing that a civilization gives to the human record, the things that are preserved; they are both the story that an era tells itself. You’d be wrong if you argued this, wrong in most ways. History is the (usually) professional work of chronicling a period of time in as much relevant detail as can be included while presenting the whole thing in a way that lets the learner see the overlaying trends and traditions that define the space between the past and the future. History is meticulous, emotionless, academic. Art, on the other hand, is fanciful, free, not compelled to represent anything about the time or the place in which its maker lives. Art is chaotic, emotional, open.

That would be the argument used against your vague, stoned-sounding theory about art and science. It would convince anyone who wasn’t paying attention. But it's very, very wrong.

But recorded history is also chaotic, full of fits and starts as humanity ducks apologetically in and out of dark ages. More often than not it is not opinionless, but biased in favor of the ruling narrative, or against the historian's getting run out of the city. And it is certainly not always nonfiction: compare the official stories of the feats of King Rameses II, etched and daubed onto the walls of his pyramid, with the few anecdotal accounts of the same events that have traveled down to us. The act of recording history is an act of making art, just as anything that comes out of an artist's mind is, in some way, reflective of their surroundings.

And the most reliable objects of historical interest, the things that can be trusted to tell us truths about the era they date from, are not words written on clay tablets by a corrupt scribe paid to paint their ruler in a good light, or didactic stories as deeply removed from reality as your priest's anecdote about a woman, recently, at a shopping mall. The touchstones that allow us to trace the histories of entire cultures are the works of art that they leave behind. Somebody said "What a culture chooses to save is what a culture chooses to say about itself." The monumental works of architecture, engineered with precision and built in two generations or more; the finely-cut stones with entire stories etched in miniature; the vases, pots, sacrificial goblets, and urinals that everyone from the Greeks to the Tibetans spun out of clay at some point in ancient history. The art tells the story; the art, and a couple stones commemorating sheep sales.

Art is history, history is art, and art history majors are insufferable (and wise). Every time Neil DeGrasse Tyson says something about the humanities being a waste of time--"We could be building atomic bombs on Mars!" he argues--he gets a little bit more wrong. Good thing we all started paying attention to other people anyway.