Beautiful Experiments in Art and Science

Scientific experiments and the artistic experiments of avant-garde artists are often praised for the simplicity or economy of their designs. In the former case, appreciators also tend to report a sense of pleasure, judging the work as beautiful. Curiously, this is typically absent in the latter case, despite shared properties like simplicity or economy. To explain these diverging responses to scientific and artistic experiments, this chapter examines different conceptions of beauty and whether they can accommodate the phenomena under discussion. From this, it is argued that a long-neglected conception of beauty, functional beauty, can account for the differing experiences reported by appreciators of artistic and scientific experiments.