The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [4]
This “pseudo-artistic play,” as Lenain terms it, is a moment-engagement with pigment that involves no planning or intellectual context. Human art not only requires calculation of effects, also needs an intention to create something you’re going to want to after you’ve finished. Here, the contrast with chimpanzees is most telling: once they have been interrupted, or have ceased of their own to brush on paint, chimps show no interest in their productions, never returning again to look at them.
The gulf between human and chimpanzee “art” should be no surprise: our ancestors branched off from theirs six million years ago. ensemble of adaptations that became the human art instinct go back prehistory only a hundred thousand years or so, a tiny one-sixtieth fraction of the time span back to our ancestral split with the chimps. has happened in the meantime, both to their family and to ours.
In contrast to chimps, the single example of an animal adaptation comes closest to human art-making occurs—amazingly—in a species remote from Homo sapiens that it isn’t even a mammal, let alone primate. The male bower bird of New Guinea displays behavior that, human, would certainly be called artistry. His woven bower, which be six feet or taller, is extravagantly ornamented, both inside and outside. On the floor and on interior walls, the bird arranges clumps berries, red leaves, displays of flowers, acorns, bright feathers from other birds, iridescent beetle elytra, and, if available, brilliantly colored human detritus—cigarette wrappers, bottle tops, tinfoil, or scraps magazines.
He then opens his bower to that most demanding critic, the female bower bird. Only when the decorations meet her exacting criteria will favor their creator with mating rights. What makes the bower bird case so extraordinary is that one sex creates an ornamented object open imaginative invention that is then critically contemplated by the other The only other animal species that does anything like this is the one that, inter alia, constructs elaborate art galleries on the island of Manhattan and elsewhere.
As I explain in chapter 8, the desire to impress—and bed—a member the opposite sex with displays of artistic creativity or the own ership rare objects tastefully arranged is not unknown in our species Would you like to come up and see my etchings?”). But as we smile, not forget the differences. By any animal standard, the bower bird’s for mance is stupendous. As with the chimp, however, the bower bird no interest in his creation once it has done its job. The bowers constructed for female critical assessment in terms of one single purpose. They are not part of an artistic culture, to be preserved, discussed, appreciated outside a pattern of animal mating. Yes, the most fascinating Barcelona. But these architectural achievements are fundamentally different because they emerge in the context of human culture and self-consciousness.
The Art Instinct is a book about human beings and the peculiarly human impulses and drives that underlie our culture. It is entirely in Darwinian spirit that we respect other animals as the astonishing creatures they are, with purposes precisely suited to their lives. From beaver dams to African termite mounds to New Guinea bowers, animals stunning objects and put on spectacular perperformances. Animals, nevertheless, do not create art.
Hauling in animal instincts to compare with human activities can suitable way to show the grand continuity of life as Darwin understood But it can also be a rhetorical strategy to cut humans down to size, reduce one (human) thing to another, much simpler (animal) thing. There is no such reductionist or deflationary strategy entailed Darwinian aesthetics. In The African Queen, the Humphrey Bogart character excuses his drinking by telling Rose Sayer, played Katharine Hepburn, that “it’s only human nature.” It may surprise some readers, but this book is on the side of Rose’s famous retort: “ Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” There need to accept Rose