Science & Tech Quote by Josef Albers

Albers draws a bright, almost mischievous line between what we study and what we smuggle into the studying. Art, he argues, can never pretend to be neutral because its raw material is people: perception, habit, desire, the social performance of looking. Science, in his formulation, gets the luxury of talking about metal or energy as if those things sit politely outside our messy motives. The jab is gentle but pointed: even science follows taste. It has trends, grant cycles, prestige objects. "Now today it's energy" lands as both observation and critique, the way a designer notices the season's palette and knows it will change.

The subtext is classic Bauhaus-era pragmatism with a spiritual aftercurrent. Albers spent a career teaching that seeing is an active act, not a passive reception: colors shift depending on adjacency; meaning changes with context. When he says "in appreciation", he's undermining the idea that art can be judged by fixed criteria the way a lab result can be repeated. Appreciation is behavior, too - a social choreography shaped by education, class, and the "fashion" of what counts as serious attention.

Then he pulls the rug: "It's the same soul behind it". The dichotomy collapses. The human impulse driving a physics breakthrough and a painting - curiosity, control, wonder, status - is shared. Albers isn't anti-science; he's anti-complacency. He's warning that every supposedly objective enterprise still has a backstage: the era's obsessions, the observer's ego, the cultural appetite that decides what becomes "important" this decade.