There is a time and a place for both. I spent many years learning to read science and to look at painting because scientists and painters themselves had spent centuries refining their expression. Science and art needed that time, in order to make their point as richly and as economically as possible. We should not expect such marvelous languages to let themselves be spoken too harshly or too quickly. In our time, the very distinction between supposed plainness and sublime difficulty has broken down.
Modern art tries to be stripped down, but it still has many people puzzled.
Scientists have an annoying habit of talking about simplicity, when they mean that matters boil down to two or three equations that plebeians cannot hope to understand. Words like plainness and simplicity may still have meaning, but life got complicated, and it necessarily became harder to say just who is conning whom. As so often in life, however, I believe that the con artist will generally be the one professing the greatest innocence. As philosophers have often stressed, there is no such thing as pure observation , free of exactly this kind of difficulty. In the end, scholarship cannot spoil our sense of beauty, because it is still up to our own sensibility to agree.