Science & Tech Quote by John Opie

Opie’s line flatters his own tribe, sure, but it’s not just painterly vanity. It’s a compact argument about power. “Science discovers” frames knowledge as something already there, waiting to be uncovered like a coastline on a map. “Art creates” flips the direction: not finding reality, but making one. The audacity of “more godlike” is the point. In the late 18th century, science was accruing prestige as the engine of modernity, explaining nature with increasing confidence. Opie counters with a rival claim to authority: art doesn’t merely report the world; it rearranges what counts as real to us.

The subtext is about agency. Discovery is reactive, constrained by what exists; creation is active, constrained mainly by imagination and craft. That’s why the sentence is built as a clean antithesis, two blunt clauses that feel like a verdict. He’s also redefining “truth” away from measurement and toward meaning. A scientific fact can be true without changing anyone; an artwork can be “true” in the messier sense that it makes an audience feel, notice, or remember differently.

Read in context, it’s a defensive maneuver against the era’s worship of empiricism. Opie isn’t denying science’s achievements; he’s asserting that art operates on a different register: the fabrication of symbols, myths, ideals, and emotional structures that societies actually live inside. If science tells you what the world is, art tells you what the world is for - and that, Opie implies, is the closer approximation to divinity.