Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why

"Ms. Dissanayake was written a number of books of which I chose Homo Aestheticus. Dissanayake was the first person to really address evolution and art-making in a serious way, at least the first book of which I am aware. Several things are interesting about her and the book. Unlike a lot of books on art, her sources were not confined or even driven by western art traditions. She lived a good part of her life in Asia and her opinions and thoughts were influenced by artwork in Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea and Manchuria. She brings a different approach as compared to many western academics. And she also didn’t rise through the usual university academic system. She is a self-taught scholar. She started to write about something that nobody was pursuing at the time. She was an outsider on both accounts. She has had an important impact on the field. Everything written on evolution and art since then has had to respond to her comments, whether or not in agreement. “What makes people react differently to different kinds of artworks?” Her argument is that it doesn’t matter how far back you look in the archaeologic record or in different parts of the word, elements of art-making or a decorative impulse exist. And so, she thinks that this fact at least is prima facie evidence that there is an evolutionary impulse for art-making. She goes on to develop an idea that there’s a generalisable desire to make things special. ‘Making special’ is a specific phrase associated with Dissanayake. She thinks that making special involves ritual and ceremony (in the repetitive form of play). She has a version of this, I think in later writings, about how this behaviour is tied to how a mother makes her child feel special. She thinks that the evolutionary significance is that these behaviours promote social cohesion in small groups. So, societies in the Palaeolithic age that were small and had had greater degrees of social cohesion were more likely to survive as a group. Her take is that these behaviours of making objects special through ritual is really what we’re talking about when we talk about making art. I am not an expert in animal art-making, although it’s certainly fascinating. I think almost any time—at least in cognitive neuroscience—when we have tried to make strong claims that humans are qualitatively different than other species more often than not we have turned out to be wrong. My take based on what little I know about animal art is that elements of animal behaviour are similar and analogous to what humans do when making art but not in their entirety. So, in the bower bird example, the decorative behaviour is directed at attracting mates. In human art-making, maybe artists do well in the mating game, but we typically think of art-making as having a broader function than being motivated by a search for the best partner possible. I do touch on these subjects. My book has three sections. On Beauty, Pleasure, and Art. It is written for a non-neuroscientist audience, to give interested people a sense of contemporary neuroaesthetics. I offer a broad framework and locate pleasure as central to the experience of beauty and less central to the experience of art. I discuss the neural basis and the evolutionary underpinnings of beauty and of art. The evolution of art is typically framed as an adaptation, as done by Ms. Dissanayake, or as an epiphenomenon, as suggested by such eminent scholars as Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker. I argue that neither view is satisfying, and offer a third way to think about the evolution of art. You will have to read the book to get a sense of this third way, which, as a teaser, involves a small bird bred over 250 years and 500 generations in Japan. Sure. We typically think of the domains of aesthetics and of art as overlapping but not identical. We might have aesthetic experiences that have nothing to do with art. Admiring an attractive person or a beautiful scenery. In these examples, people can have profound aesthetic experiences that are not about art. On the other hand, many aspects of art have little to do with aesthetics per se. And this is thinking of aesthetics as a sensory experience. The term came from Baumgarten to mean something like ‘informed sensory experience.’ For example, one might be interested in what happened to art in Europe once the Arabic-Hindu number system was imported. The scholarship of how that happened and its influence on art might be very interesting, but they’re not necessarily aesthetic concerns. So, we need not conflate art and aesthetics. “People can have profound aesthetic experiences that are not about art” From a neuroscientist’s point of view, we’re interested in human experience. What is the experience of encountering these objects? There are other scientific questions. There might be material concerns with artwork, like: What kind of materials were used? Do certain chemicals that were used in mixing paints change colour over time as they get oxidised? Those are scientific questions about artwork but they’re not necessary aesthetic questions; nor are they neuroscience questions."