That's perhaps disingenuous. Artists are not known for their critical thinking skills. Scientists are defined by them.

Maybe our definitions of critical thinking are different, but I've always regarded artists as masters of critical thinking.

From the wikipedia article: "The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."

Try to do anything in art without a mastery of that and you're probably not going to produce good work.

Then why do so many artists practice crystal magic and goofy food fads? Why are so many deniers of science? Maybe its just the posers, the non-masters that do that?

Citation needed. All the artists I know are reasonable people. And I could fine plenty of scientists & enginers who practice the equivalent of crystal magic. For instance, Ray Kurzweill and his 100 vitamin pill a day bid to live long enough for his brain to be kept alive in a jar.

Artists would ask, why do so many scientists and engineers have such trouble telling good art from terrible art? Why do they have so much trouble distinguishing what they "can" do from what they "should" do? (example: the intense regret that many Manhattan Project scientists experienced during the Cold War)

Scientific knowledge affects all of us, but it is only one of a number of domains of knowledge. If you judge art based on scientific understanding, of course you're going to have trouble. It would be like trying to score a baseball game with football rules.

Maybe someday we'll be able to apply the equations of science to art--I do believe in a mechanical, causal universe (i.e. I don't believe in crystal magic). But art is a product of culture, which is itself an abstraction of incredibly complex interactions of incredibly complex systems: human beings.

Edit to add: artists have trouble with understanding science because they are attempting to judge it with their artistic understanding of the world. It's the inverse of my sports analogy above--they are trying to score a football game with baseball rules, so they get it wrong.

My point is that does not mean they are dumb or ignorant or incapable of critical thinking. Just differently trained and coming from a different context.

For what it's worth, there are plenty of engineers and programmers who also have trouble with scientific knowledge (see discussions of climate change here on HN or Slashdot). I think that is because engineering and science are two closely related, but ultimately different domains of knowledge.

I doubt there's a strong correlation between an artistic propensity and an adeptness for critical thinking. But if the artist is commercially successful, the correlation may exist, on the ground that commercial success implies effective reality-testing.

Also, it's important to say that what constitutes an artist is very, very subjective. Virtually anyone can say they're an artist, because there aren't any objective criteria that would pass muster with someone skilled in ... critical thinking.

Not everyone can say they understand everyday reality and can function within it, because that claim can be easily proven or falsified. But anyone can say they're an artist who hasn't found their audience yet. Such a claim appeals more to the charity of the listener than to a meaningful comparison with reality.

Try to paint a portrait without being able to critically deconstruct how light, shadow, and perspective interplay and you probably won't get too far. Seems to me it takes a lot of critical thinking about the world to be able to do that.

Or maybe it's contemporary conceptual based art you're thinking about? A lot of it requires the artist to think critically about human social structures in order to create commentary on it.

Sure, anyone can claim they're an artist and produce work that is not well thought out or executed, but that's not a reason to conclude that artists lack critical thinking skills. Every professional working artist I know here in NYC is exceptionally good with critical thought.

Just because you don't use a logic based language to reason doesn't mean you're not thinking critically.

I think it's probably a more accurate statement to say that scientists do not respect the critical thinking skills of artists. The fact is that many artists feel the same way about scientists. Feynman wrote about this in some of his memoirs.