Last week, I talked about the sense of beauty. I argued first that it would be very strange if there were human beings, or even human-like beings, who are incapable of making Kantian judgements of taste. Then, in a second post, I reviewed some attempts to account for universal norms of beauty in evolutionary terms, i.e. the standards by which we determine what things are beautiful. These attempts get the domain of beauty wrong. From their perspective, chocolates and sex should also be objects of beauty. But this is not the right category for sex. In sum, I think that the sense of beauty is universal–but that norms of beauty are parochial and hard to account for in evolutionary terms, at least if it’s important to account for them as beauty.
Today I want to reflect on the universality of art, which has been illuminatingly discussed by Ellen Dissanayeke, Stephen Davies, Noël Carroll, and Denis Dutton. The phenomena are striking.
- Art has extremely ancient, perhaps even pre-Homo sapiens, origins. Hand axes made by H. ergaster one and a half million years ago display a symmetry unrelated to function, and these was highly time-consuming to produce. Forty thousand years ago, at Enkapune Ya Muto in Kenya, people made delicate strings of beads out of ostrich eggshell, an extremely delicate process. While these artifacts lack the individual style of their makers, and are hence better classified as craftworks, they nevertheless display a “disinterested”–this term will be explained later–regard for appearance and form that is the hallmark of art.
- Every culture, no matter how isolated, sings, dances, tells stories, erects monuments, and draws visual patterns that exploit regularity, repetition, and enclosure. Almost every culture makes visual images. In every culture, there are codified styles or genres that govern each such activity.
- In every culture, there are connoisseurs who appreciate formal skill in these activities–skill in execution that goes beyond the primary appeal of works in these media. For example, while the tune and the beat of a musical performance give pleasure to almost all who share in the culture, there are always some specially knowledgeable consumers who value aspects of the performance that are not evident to all–fine control of dynamics, ornamentation, syncopation, breath-control, phrasing, and so on.
- At least some art works in every culture carry a kind of augustness or specialness that more quotidian artefacts lack. They are highly worked and made from expensive, rare, and specially treated materials; they are kept in hallowed places; possessing them is symbolic of power and wealth; they are associated with communal occasions on which daily work is suspended for musical or dramatic performances, etc. Ellen Dissanayeke makes this specialness a defining characteristic of art, and it is certainly true that every culture makes at least some art-objects special in these ways. (One qualification: the specialness accorded to an artwork must manifest itself in its creation and form. The millionth Mickey Mouse watch might have been placed in a museum: this would not make it an artwork.)
- Most individuals appreciate some genres within every broad form of art. It is a recognized disability, for instance, not to appreciate any form of music, and surely the same must be true of visual art and drama. And most can recognize an artwork as such: for as Noël Carroll says (echoing a remark of Stephen Davies): “Europeans can recognize a statue of Ganesha as an artwork without being able to know its symbolic import.” Similarly, it is evident to us that the cave drawings at Lascaux are art, though they were created nearly 20,000 years ago in a context completely unknown to us. (Nicolas Humphrey suggests that these were the products of pre-linguistic humans with “pre-modern” minds. Extremely unlikely, but this would support the idea that art has pre-modern human origins.) A qualification: recognition of artworks is far from infallible. A member of an isolated tribe might take a Mickey Mouse watch to be an artwork, noting its colourful design and elaborate mechanical movement.
- The universality of art cannot be understood just by unique origin and cultural transmission. It is possible that there was a first visual artwork from which all subsequent visual art descended. (This would be analogous to the invention of potato- and wheat-washing by a single female Japanese macaque, Imo, and the subsequent imitative transmission of the practice within her troup.) But even if this was so, art, technology, and language are parts of a suite of cognitive capacities associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Colin Renfrew remarks:
[I]n the early days, when our species was beginning to differentiate from earlier ancestors such as Homo ergaster, it was not simply the innate genetic capacity . . . to conceive of and make artifacts that was important. . . . The know-how of making and using those artifacts was not passed on genetically . . . It was learned. . . In what we may term the speciation phase of human development, up to around one hundred thousand years ago, genetic and cultural co-evolution must have been an important mechanism, operating for more than a million years.
Renfrew’s point is that the human species differentiated itself from its predecessors (and thus became a separate species) by evolving the capacity to teach and to learn sophisticated culture. Cultural transmission, including the cultural transmission of art, is a part of evolved human nature: we are capable of learning to execute and appreciate complex artistic styles. On the plausible assumption that the enjoyment of art is a prerequisite for learning it, it must also be of the historical essence of H. sapiens that its members are capable of aesthetic appreciation. The single origin hypothesis presupposes these capacities of appreciate and learn; it does not eliminate it.
Art seems, then, to be a part of human nature. It is evolved. Is it an adaptation? In the concluding posts of this series, I’ll consider this question.
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