Art

The arts in all their glory are no more remote from evolved features of the human mind and personality than an oak is remote from the soil and subterranean waters that nourish and sustain it. The evolution of Homo sapiens in the past million years is not just a history of how we come to have acute colour vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait. It is also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and entrapture ourselves, from children’s games to the quarters of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.

. . . . Picasso defined art as the lie that helps us to see the truth

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Dinesh ^club

There are plenty of species that sing songs and do dances far beyond what basic biological needs might seem to require. Gibbons sing stylized duets to one another, cranes do a fabulous mating dances, birds of paradise eloquently flaunt their wares. But so far there is only one animal we know who makes physical, constructed works of art, building structures whose complexity and elaboration seem to suggest art for art’s sake. Sexual selection may explain the process away, but it says little about why such aesthetic ability appeared in the particular species. This reasonable explanation says nothing about the levels of intricacy and excess tht mark this activity, which amazes most humans who see it, and gives justification for the idea that art is a pure form can be made by creatures far away from humanity on the gnarled evolutionary tree. ~ Page 3

17 months ago. Edited 17 months ago.

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