1 A Biological Basis for Art
Here is a story that might be told about the biological basis of art’s creation and appreciation by an evolutionary theorist:
It’s plausible, then, that the impulse to make and consume art is a product of biological evolution. It is important to be clear about what this means. The thought isn’t that there is some single gene for art, or that art production and appreciation are inflexible and reflexive. The genetic bases of the production of art are undoubtedly complicated. They require the realization of complex systems and circumstances, both personal and social, for their activation. The behaviors to which they give rise are plastic, being subject to learning, influence, development, refinement, and the like. There can be no denying that art includes a huge, conventionalized, socio-historical component.
The idea, then, isn’t that the making and consumption of art can be analyzed reductively as mechanical reactions blindly programmed by our genetic inheritance. Rather, it is that they stem from and are channeled by biologically rooted inclinations that are then actively and intelligently taken up in ways depending on each person’s individual, cultural, and historical environment. In other words, artists, performers, and their audiences all draw on biological agendas and energies, but how these are then expressed depends mainly on their cultural setting. The view with which this one is to be contrasted maintains that the behaviors associated with art are purely cultural and entirely conventional.
The evolutionary biologist faces a choice between two positions about the relation between human biological endowments and art. The first maintains that the making and consumption of art are directly adaptive; that is, they contribute to reproductive success (or, at least, did so in the past). According to the second, these propensities were not directly targeted by evolution, but they are a happy and inevitable byproduct of other behaviors that were.
A common version of the first approach notes that reproductive success depends on our attracting mates, which we do by advertising our fitness as a potential partner and parent. One way of doing this is by demonstrating that we have the particular skills and talents that will be involved. Alternatively, we might display in a general way that we have intelligence, originality, creativity, flexibility, and virtuosity in thought and action. And we can dramatize and emphasize our fitness by showing that we can afford the luxury of “wasting” our talents on activities that have no survival value.
Art-making and artistic performance, which so often require extraordinary skill and dedication in their conception, planning, and execution, while not being directed to survival in an obvious way, are among the ultimate tools for sexual advertisement and seduction. In this view, art behaviors, like the peacock’s tail, have evolved through the process of sexual selection.
A different account takes a broader and perhaps more plausible view of art’s evolutionary significance. Art plays a crucial role in intensifying and enriching our lives in general, both as individuals and communities. It brings us together as producers or performers and consumers or audiences and thereby engenders cooperation, mutuality, and a shared identity. When coupled with other socially important events, such as rituals and ceremonies, it heightens their already special powers. As such, it plays a vital role in transmitting and affirming the community’s knowledge, lore, history, and values.
It enhances the reproductive success of the members of communities not by making sex more likely, but instead by contributing vitally to the creation of an environment in which individuals and their children can flourish. It generates mutual support and respect, a shared sense of belonging and caring, stability, self-confirmation, a feeling of control of or accommodation with nature, and so on.
It could be objected that the first of these accounts seems to undervalue the far-reaching significance of art within human affairs, and that the second does not distinguish a role specific to art as such. Meanwhile, both may make the tie between art and reproductive success closer than is believable.
If such criticisms prove strong, evolutionary theorists could fall back to the more modest alternative, according to which art is an indirect but important spin-off from other behaviors for which there has been evolutionary selection. It isn’t difficult to imagine what these behaviors are. Curiosity, adaptability, intelligence, the ability to plan and reason, imagination, improvisatory facility, and patience are all characteristics that promote the survival of people and their heirs. And what is likely to pay off is that these capacities are general and rewarding for their own sakes, not tied in their application only to addressing a limited set of short-term problems.
But once such a being has evolved and finds itself with some spare time, it continues to employ its talents. It can busy itself with inventing new weapons or a more effective mousetrap, but it’s as likely to make up stories, paint evocative pictures of the animals it hunts, decorate its hair with pretty flowers, test what interesting sounds it can make by blowing into a pipe, and so on.
No less important to it will be emotions and their expression, the communication of thoughts, and the development of manipulative and other technical skills. These, too, can find expression in the production of art; for example, in musical invocations by instruments of the tones of the human voice, in the versification of utterance along with the use of metaphor, assonance, irony, and the like, and in developing pictorial and other forms of representation.
2 The Cultural Invention of Art
Here is a second story about art’s origins, as it might be told by a cultural historian.
If our conception of art is the one just described, then art is a product of a specific culture and history, not of biology. This conception is local and comparatively recent, not universal and old. It emerged in Europe over the Enlightenment and the modern age – that is, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth – under the influence of specific socio-economic conditions that did not obtain elsewhere or in earlier times.
Historians of ideas dispute when particular elements of this way of thinking emerged. They also argue about whether nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in aesthetic theorizing misrepresent the views that first appeared in the eighteenth century. These scholarly debates will not detain us here. Despite significant differences between the view’s variants, and despite the long period over which it emerged, by the early twentieth century the doctrines associated with this conception of art had become dominant in Anglo-American philosophy of art.
The story continues:
(As a concession to her opponent, our story-teller might allow that biologically based urges and interests would tend to encourage the flowering of some correlate to the Western notion of art in other, sufficiently stable, cultures.)
In ancient times, the various art forms were not recognized as comprising a unified group. Music, for example, was classed with mathematics and astronomy, while poetry was grouped with grammar and rhetoric. The first to link the art forms together explicitly and to separate them from other disciplines and activities were the authors of encyclopedias and ...
