What does "for art to come up with some vocation" mean? 1. Representational theories of art treat the work of the artist as similar to that of the scientist. Both, so to speak, are involved in describing the external world. But by the nineteenth century, any comparison between the scientist and the artist was bound to make the artist look like a poor relation in terms of making discoveries about the world or holding a mirror up to nature. ( ② ) Here, science clearly had the edge. ( So, there was a social pressure for art to come up with some vocation that both distinguished it from science and, at the same time, made it equal in stature to science. ) The notion that art specialized in the expression of the emotions was particularly attractive in this light.