The Role of Creation in Art

About a week ago or so, I had mentioned that apologetics is more like art than like science: it is about applying one's ideas to a given matter, rather than trying to objectively interpret that matter itself. And as was brought up, this is not quite like how artists look at their work; artists can be just as surprised as anyone else by what they come up with. This seems to me to be a legitimate problem; so what is the difference between the scientist and the artist/apologist?

It seems that we cannot really separate out creation and discovery, subjectivity and objectivity. The pure "artist" would be entirely subjective, purely creating without any worry for the object matter. God is the only one who would fit here, and even then we would have to talk about the relation of essences and nature to God's creation. The pure scientist would be entirely objective, purely discovering what is in the world. It seems that this is a legitimate view of the ideal scientist, while the above is not necessarily the ideal artist; many artists want to explore their art and not purely create, it seems to me. Still, I don't have a better word coming to mind right now, so I will talk about the ideal scientist and the ideal artist.

It does seem that artists still fall closer to this ideal than to that of the scientist. Once one decides on a musical motif, or on a particular image or character for a literary work, the rest of the work may very well already be determined. A well-cohering work demands that things fit together in a certain way, after all; the good artist is feeling out the essential structure of such things (or if you don't like talk of essences, then simply "the way something is and its tendencies" or some such equivalent). But despite this determination of a work once certain elements have been chosen, the elements and a general notion of the work would seem to be necessary in the first place. This is applied to the matter in a work closer to that of creation than of discovery, even if everything after is closer to something discovered.

Of course, someone could point out that artists often just come up with their ideas. Some flash of insight arises, and they go to work, but they didn't plan out their insight. True, and perhaps this is moment of genius is what happens in most truly good art even. I at least know that works for which I had a sudden inspiration tend to work out better than ones which more fully plan out, although that is in part my own lack of skill. But even if this is still outside the control of the artist, it comes about in a different way than the application of the idea to the matter. Both may be more or less determined, but they are determined in different ways, and it is this difference between the more ideal/spiritual/mental/etc. arising of the idea, and the working out of its consequences in the matter, in which I am interested.

So, with that said, the artist (along with the apologist) is not merely creating, just as real scientists aren't merely discovering. But it stills seems that placing them at different points of the continuum is reasonable.