And to say it with the words of Albert Camus (1913–1960): “La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. By the words of Jules Verne (1828–1905): “Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth”. To negate this is to deny the functioning of science itself. Failures are part of the joys of experimenting. And as such they are also the necessary prelude to the satisfaction of a successful experiment and to the elation of discovering something no one has ever seen before.

Negative results, hard-to-interpret data and technical troubleshooting are a conspicuous part of the scientific process of every experimenter, regardless of her/his experience or the nature of the scientific question. Every person who has ever worked in a research environment can relate to those words too. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) describes in his 1983 novella Worstward Ho the very essence of the artistic process itself. Astonishing, poetic and perplexing artistic works could release scientific creativity and overcome the boundaries between art and science. To stimulate a fertile and interdisciplinary dialogue between artists and fungal scientists, we here present some examples of the inspirational powers of fungi and fungal science for contemporary art. Microbiologists further consider them as useful for industrial exploitation or per se as interesting because they are gratifying objects to study basic phenomena of life. Others are appreciated for their unique and delicious taste in our eating culture. Some are perceived as disgusting or dangerous because associated with dirt or death. They evoke within each of us different feelings and inner pictures. The relationship of the arts and fungi is not immediate however, fungi are ideal subjects for artists. The arts have the power to irritate, to provoke and to let us think and dream about the impossible.

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