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| is not a repetition of the art of the past, even in the work of an individual artist, when it may be stylistically similar. Some way must be worked out, especially for young children, to display their art in a way that emphasizes its evolving character. Nowadays, conceptual artists complain that too much emphasis is placed on the individual and isolated work of an artist. I agree with their complaint, but I believe that they have reacted to it in a sterile way. The quality of the process in art should be shown by displaying flowing streams of art. There are usually many alternate ways of selecting particular pieces for such streams. If learners of art were fully aware of these flows in themselves and others, they would be more interested in what they are doing and learning. Retrospective art shows are mounted only for already famous artists, and even these are often spotty in terms of illustrating evolution. I do want to talk here about a current trend toward the trivialization of art. Artists have contributed as much toward this disturbing trend as have its interpreters. When people assert that we need more science, they say so with a conviction that more science will have an effect on the way people live and solve their problems. But when they say, "This city needs more art," they usually mean only that the art will make the city prettier, much as they might say, 'This city needs more trees." When people say that children can and do express themselves through art, they think of its impact on the expresser, on the child. They do not understand that the child's art could change the feelings and behavior of parents, teachers, or other children. Such expression is seen as a type of psychic therapy and not as a vital means of communication. There are ways of thinking about the activities involved in science and art that suggest parallels between them without denying their essential differences. Both art and science start with an awareness of simple patterns in experience, whether within oneself, or as a part of a relationship with the external world. Both art and science record and elaborate | these simple patterns and express them as either the sketches of a painter or the empirical "laws" of the physicist. But both physics and painting include a stage beyond simple pattern recognition and recording: both order, sort, and combine the perceived patterns and thereby discover patterns of patterns that are perceived at this higher level - frequently as a result of astonishing intuitive leaps. These patterns of patterns, works of art and theories, show that elementary patterns, which had appeared as disconnected and unrelated, actually combine to form a unified experience that provides a broader and deeper view of nature and of the way people react within it. In science, these patterns of patterns, these theories, lead to the discovery of new things that are happening around us. They also serve as a guide to the means we can use to cope with and react to the good and the unpleasant ways that nature impinges on us. Why then do city planners not look at paintings in order to learn how to design rich city environments? Why don't architects look at a Cezanne to design cafes in which old men play checkers together? Why don't people look at portraits to find more meaning and wonder in the transformations that occur in aging faces and bodies? Or on a simpler scale, why don't people realize that paintings enable us to see the world in a new light and to find pattern and structure in objects and scenes that, without art, have been perceived only as a shapeless, amorphous, and emotionless background? People have overemphasized the idea of validity in science, and they treat the collective "right answer," which is proclaimed to be science, with dry respect. They are not aware of the extent to which theories are modes of imagining, or that theories serve more as guides for exploration than as statements of absolute truths. But even more dramatically, people have denied the existence of validity in art because there can be no proclaimed collective validity in this endeavor. Yet each artist makes choices, does over things that seem wrong, and even starts afresh when previous work has led into a blind alley. How can one deny validity in the face of admitting | ||