One could call science the art of splitting. From the atom to the genus, science works by breaking things down and studying how the smaller and smaller pieces work. But in reality much of these splittings are arbitrary, they never exist as strongly in nature as they do in our minds. Take the split between alive and dead, so fundamental to so many sciences. But yet, in practice, the closer one looks the more this split falls apart. Is a virus alive? It's little more than a string of chemicals able to hijack the reproductive action of a truly living cell. Even in the macro forms of life like ourselves, the division between life and death is much hazier than we like to admit. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to define death, from the cessation of the heart to the absence of brain activity. All have been found faulty. The only truly reliable indicator is rot.
In the end we must accept that death is not a binary state that begins at a certain second, but rather one end of a spectrum. But, we cannot do away with the idea of death. The split between living and dead is crucial to our understanding the world. This is why science is the art of splitting. Because these divisions do not exist in reality. Therefore it is up to us to invent the dividing lines that best aid us in our understanding. In other words, when we split nature what we are doing is engaging in an act of imagination meant to enrich and better our understanding of the world. And if that isn't art, then I don't know what is.