[vhawk01]

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I don't think any artist can really compare to a great scientist in this debate. I feel like if you remove a single artist or writer it would suck to not have their work but things would be pretty much the same. Of course if Einstein never existed we would have found everything he discovered but it is hard to tell how long it would have taken. For an artist to have that kind of impace it would have to be something like lving in a world where Go Dog Go is considered a great piece of literature and Shakesphere comes along and gives us Hamlet. I don't think anything like that has evern happened.

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I think thats a pretty decent argument. I'm not some philistine who thinks art is useless or that "my 5 year old nephew could do that" but I think that you can legitimately say that if Van Gogh never lived we'd never notice the difference, and the NEXT best painter ever would give everyone just as much pleasure. Art seems to me to be more of a relative accomplishment. Maybe I'm way off, I admittedly know very little about art. Wheras someone who invented some useful technology has an objective and calculable impact on the world that is irreplacable. Sure someone would have eventually made the same discovery (probably) but that would have taken X years and resulted in Y millions of people suffering.