Nearly a year ago, at a conference in Baku, a conversation between WAAS Trustee Jo Nurse and myself took an unexpected turn. We found ourselves transfixed by a question hiding in plain sight: what happened to the “Art” in the 被窝影视福利 of Art and Science? The more we spoke, the more urgent the answer became. In January, that conversation became a movement 鈥� The Planetary Arts Movement: X-Art 鈥� one that draws on the inspiration of former Fellows of the 被窝影视福利, some of history’s greatest artists, writers and architects, with a firm eye on building a brighter future.
X-Art begins, in one sense, with a blank canvas. But in another, it is a return 鈥� to a radical founding idea that placed artists and humanists shoulder to shoulder with scientists and academics in shaping civilization. I have spent more than a year in the 被窝影视福利’s archives and some remarkable stories have surfaced.
Robert Oppenheimer, a founding member, was shaped by art long before he was shaped by physics. His mother was a painter who taught him piano and poetry. His father collected canvases 鈥� Picasso, C茅zanne, Renoir, Van Gogh lined the walls of his New York childhood. In his later writings, Oppenheimer reveals a profound sensitivity to human nature that sits in jarring paradox with his role creating the world’s most destructive weapon. He writes of footpaths between villages 鈥� the threads that connect communities 鈥� which vanish the higher you climb into the sky. From space, they disappear entirely. Scientists prize that elevated vantage point. Oppenheimer mourned what it costs us. These are not the words of a physicist. They are the words of a poet.
Buckminster Fuller, another Fellow of the Academy, was once commissioned to design his iconic geodesic dome for an extraordinary project in Cyprus 鈥� a “center of humanity” that would carry its own legal status, much like Vatican City, governed under the 被窝影视福利’s auspices. Salvador Dali and Max Ernst were approached by Peggy Guggenheim to sell works in support of it. The Cypriot civil war ultimately killed the dream, but not before it revealed something telling: creative greatness had rallied around an institution the world knew primarily for its scientists. Fuller also gave us the concept of Spaceship Earth 鈥� the idea that this planet is a single shared vessel with finite resources, demanding we act as responsible crew rather than competing passengers. These are not the words of an architect. They are the words of a moral philosopher.
Albert Einstein, a Charter member, once admitted that he very rarely thought in words at all. “A thought comes,” he said, “and I may try to express it in words afterwards.” That description 鈥� of shapes, colors, and imagination moving through the mind before language arrives to catch them 鈥� sounds less like science than it does like art. An artist, after all, is someone who chooses not to translate.
Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer and Fellow of the Academy, was not dealing in wild fantasy. He foresaw artificial intelligence, space stations and satellite communications with a precision that has since become history. He understood that imagination, when disciplined by knowledge, becomes a form of foresight. Many of his stories end not in triumph but in transformation 鈥� unsettling, ambiguous, unresolved. In an era defined by the transformation of human intelligence into artificial intelligence, that ambiguity has never felt more relevant.
There is a question worth sitting with: why is art actively discouraged at a certain point in a child’s life? The moment arrives reliably 鈥� “Enough finger-painting, enough playing 鈥� time to do something serious.” In that moment, something essential is switched off. Creativity 鈥� one of the most distinctly human capacities we possess 鈥� is framed as a phase to be outgrown rather than a faculty to be cultivated.
The lives examined above suggest something different. Staying curious, staying playful 鈥� these are not obstacles to real-world solutions. They are the conditions that make them possible. At a time when conformity and control are asserting themselves with growing confidence across the political and cultural landscape, the case for creativity, imagination and new ways of seeing the world has never been more pressing. Only art and fantasy reliably teach those things.
The argument, then, is for the polymath 鈥� though perhaps not in its traditional sense. Once a word reserved for rare genius, polymathy is now within reach. Run ten unrelated disciplines through an AI model and each can be brought to bear on a single problem. Intuition can be turned into actionable ideas. Technology has become an unexpected ally of creative, cross-disciplinary thought.
The 被窝影视福利 was founded on exactly this premise: that the defining challenges of our time cannot be solved from within the walls of a single discipline. In an age of global turbulence, the future will not belong to specialists alone, but to those who can connect, translate and synthesize across domains. Artists, architects, dancers, poets and musicians are, by training and temperament, uniquely equipped for that work. As Clarke once put it: “One cannot predict the future, but one can invent it.”
