Science Quote by Kary Mullis

Coming from Kary Mullis, the Nobel-winning chemist who built a career on the repeatable logic of PCR and a personal brand on gleeful contrarianism, this is less a complaint about taste than a jab at the prestige machinery around art. “Arbitrary” is the provocation: it’s a scientist’s word for noise, for outcomes that can’t be derived from first principles or reliably reproduced. By pairing it with “fashion,” Mullis frames the art world as a market of signals and status, where value is set not by intrinsic merit but by the shifting desires of gatekeepers, collectors, and institutions.

The intent isn’t to deny that art can be powerful; it’s to puncture the moral certainty that often gets stapled to cultural judgment. In science, Mullis’s native terrain, fashion can exist (trendy topics, hot methods), but it’s ideally disciplined by falsifiability. Art, he implies, lacks that external referee, so its hierarchies are vulnerable to being mistaken for truth. The subtext is classic Mullis: skepticism toward consensus, impatience with credentialed authority, and a preference for outsider clarity over insider reverence.

Context matters because Mullis wasn’t a laboratory bureaucrat; he was a high-profile dissenter who distrusted institutional narratives. That posture makes the line read like a warning about confusing reputation for reality. It also carries a sly concession: art’s “arbitrariness” is inseparable from its freedom. Fashion may be fickle, but it’s also a record of what a culture is hungry to believe about itself, right now.