Pondering art ...

... Beauty and the Best. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In science, progress is a fact (except for the most extreme of epistemological sceptics, none of whom, nevertheless, would be entirely indifferent as to whether their surgeon used the surgical techniques of, say, the 1830s, rather than those of this century). The most mediocre bacteriologist alive today knows incomparably more that did Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, for example; the most mediocre physics graduate knows incomparably more than Sir Isaac Newton ever did. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative. But no one would suggest that the paintings of Rothko were better than those, say, of Chardin because he lived a long time after Chardin, and that Chardin’s were better than those of Velasquez for the same reason.

It's also worth exploring more thoroughly the metaphors underlying much art criticism. In art "experiment" is undertaken for its own sake and is praised simply for having been done. In science, experiment is a means to an end and most experiments routinely fail. That very failure, though, leads to greater knowledge. If artists took their "experiments" as seriously as scientists take theirs, we would see much less crap cluttering the world's art galleries. The artist's experiments would have ended up in the studio trash can.
Then there's the military metaphor of the avant-garde. Well, in battle, the advance guard is likely to be decimated, not feted.