What Role Do You Think Art Has in Forming an Identity

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One area of the human experience that seems non to have parallels out in nature is the arts. It is difficult to conceive of a pigeon Picasso or a birdie Botticelli. Indeed, only a few creature species have fifty-fifty the faintest hints of the beginning of culture. Without culture, in that location actually tin can't be fine art, as we know it, because art cannot exist separate from culture. Art reflects culture, transmits civilization, shapes culture, and comments on culture. There is just no way that animals can mayhap experience art as nosotros do.

And there is the rub. Of class, they don't experience art as we do because they don't experience anything as we practice. And nosotros don't experience anything as another animate being does either. But if we really think about what art is and how it first began in humans, we might indeed see budding artists among our animal friends.

Art is nearly beauty

If we divorce art from its cultural implications, nosotros can hold that art is very often all to do with the expression of beauty. Throughout history, much artwork was made for no other explicit purpose than the production of dazzler. Artwork is to be beheld and admired. Information technology is scenic and tin even make us emotional. Information technology is this beauty that I draw the first connection between nature and art. Nature and art are both beautiful, no matter how you define beauty. They both can dazzle us and hold united states breathless. They tin inspire us and brand u.s.a. feel connected to something. They both can strike an emotional nervus that leaves an impact on us that is non soon forgotten. Perhaps this connection between art and emotion reveals something almost the origin of art.

Kickoff, let's consider a specific subset of the beauty we find in the natural world: beautiful animals. From the unmatched colors of a tropical macaw to the flowing mane of an African panthera leo, to the striking features of a mandarinfish, animals are beautiful. Just never was the saying, "beauty is in the eye of the holder" more truthful than in the animal world. The bright and flashy colors that we see in many animals have evolved to be conspicuous, to assistance the animal "stick out." The most spectacularly beautiful animals are so decorated in society to become the attraction, respect, or fearfulness of other animals. In all cases, the utility of the beauty is found in the reaction information technology gets from the observer. Tin can't the exact same thing exist said of man art?

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Although information technology'south not all about sexual activity, much of beast beauty is indeed about impressing potential mates. To date, scientists accept found no other reason that peacocks have those cute and intricate tails except that peahens seem to dig them. These tails are not a small decorative adornment, either. The peacock tail is more than than 60% of its torso length. When they try to walk, let alone fly, with those obnoxious monstrosities, it is a lamentable sight indeed.

Nevertheless, peahens are deeply attracted to this tail, and peafowl are not the only species with a strategy like this. Beginning in the simplest of invertebrates, colorful and striking ornament has been used to attract mates. I could requite a long list of beautifully colored animals whose intricate visual patterns are designed for no other purpose than attraction of a mate, but I don't recall it'southward necessary.

Art and beauty evoke an emotional response

This beauty-every bit-sexy miracle has a deep biological parallel with human fine art because it is the connexion of a visual stimulus with an inner emotional land. In the case of an attractive creature, the external physical dazzler is transformed into a want, a behavioral impulse in the brain of the observer. When peahens behold a beautiful peacock, they are "moved" past it, in the sense that it affects their electric current mental state. We know this because it affects their behavior and we assume that behaviors spring from mental states. This is exactly what the fine arts are all nigh in humans: they employ a visual stimulus to bear on the mental or emotional state of the viewers.

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Art induces remember of past events or emotions

Admittedly, art and dazzler in humans is more than than just sex appeal. The effectiveness of art depends on some bones assumptions virtually the knowledge and experience that is common between the creative person and the audience. Andy Warhol'due south Campbell's Soup Cans will probably have very lilliputian impact on the bushmen of eastern Africa. Art capitalizes on specific stored memories and associations in the encephalon of the observer. Hither, we have the 2d clue to the origin of art in humans: visual recall of past events and emotions.

As human being brains became more sophisticated over the terminal one thousand thousand years, we became capable of storing extensive details as memories, a skill that came in handy every bit our behaviors became more detailed. The hunting and gathering way of life common to all of the diverse hominid species required extensive visual memory. How else could they have achieved organized grouping hunting, fashioning of simple tools, and the deciphering of the migratory patterns of large game on the African savannah? These complicated skills crave the comparison of current visual cues with past experience in a computational and predictive style. Design recognition is what nosotros are talking about hither.

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Further still, the ability to make and use tools, a skill that began in apes and exploded in hominids, requires a groovy deal of visual and tactile memory. As fully modern Homo sapiens began making tools that were more and more than sophisticated, we suddenly establish ourselves with the ability to depict our memories using archaic painting implements. With our newfound cognitive abilities, our impressive memory-think, and eventually tools, it is not at all surprising that the first art produced past our ancestors depicted the very subject that probably spawned all of our cerebral abilities in the get-go identify: the hunt.

Cave paintings are the primeval artifacts that anthropologists and art historians agree are truly art, just I find it hard to believe that they didn't also facilitate functions in the communities in which they were created. We could speculate all day about what those functions could accept been, but I call back the point is that the benefits of beingness able to create a visual representation was immediately recognized. I also seriously dubiety that the cave paintings were the first such attempts at visual representations. They were just the first that ended up surviving through the eons.

Fine art aids in communication and education

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As language was developing in Human sapiens during the keen leap forward, humans began didactics each other virtually the tools they'd made, the food they plant, and the skills they had perfected. This was the showtime of the concept of education. I can't imagine that the education of the paleolothic era didn't also make use of visual aids, like education does today. Whether they were just crude drawings made past dragging sticks in the dirt, or more elaborate representation on stone "canvases," I am sure that drawings accompanied spoken communication (or gestures) right from the beginning. One time again, the key feature was the ability to use visual representations to induce memory recall or visual understanding. By drawing something, an early man could make another human being recollect something.

Various forms of drawing, painting, and other visual depictions most certainly facilitated communication and education among early on humans. That much seems rather obvious. In improver, it seems likely that early humans also used the new innovation of artistic depictions for diverse efforts of trouble-solving and calculation. Every bit cognition connected to develop, it began to grow into consciousness and introspection as we think of them today.

The visual arts were probably right there with us forth the way, helping to provide a means to express the complex thoughts that were outset to materialize in our massive brains. Indeed, appreciation and agreement of fine art seem to be amidst the highest-social club functions of the human encephalon.

For these reasons, I tend to believe that artistic expression and reactions to art evolved hand-in-hand with higher cognitive functions in early humans. It is natural that the new richness of our inner experience would also manifest in artistic outward expression. In turn, the communication of that inner experience through art would find receptive observers and the miracle of art then became ingrained culturally.

I too fully wait that creative talent would accept eventually been transferred from our civilisation to our genes. After all, during a million or ii years of natural selection, artistic ability was likely to confer some advantage on those that had information technology. This reward could have come in the form of increased social continuing equally a leader in the hunt, a prolific teacher of skills, and and then on. Any special identify in the social construction means greater odds of reproductive success. In this fashion, I suspect, humanity evolved into a species of artists and art enthusiasts.

Practice other animals brand art?

Once humanity developed a tendency to produce artistic renderings, there was plenty of biological space for information technology to flourish and reasons why information technology would exist favored, but how might it take emerged in the first place? Surely the behavior of art production cannot be traced to a singular mutation. What precursors might have existed that immune art to sally? Are in that location whatever examples of animals making something we would consider artful?

There is an Indian artist named Siri, whose drawings currently go for hundreds or thousands of dollars. She has been written nigh extensively and featured in publications from Harper'due south Weekly to the Los Angeles Times. Her piece of work ranges from abstract to highly representational art including landscapes and self-portraits. Of grade, she trained for many years to develop this skill, but she can now consummate a painting in mere minutes. Siri is a 50 year old Asian Elephant.

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Siri is not alone. Scores of elephants take been taught to pigment. The art that these elephants produce by holding a brush in their trunks is truly impressive. It's certainly better than anything I could produce. What these elephants are really doing, in terms of producing art or only repeating a trained task, is the subject of heated debate. I don't intend to wade into those murky waters. Rather, I mention painting elephants hither only to betoken that the technical skill set necessary to produce fine art is certainly not unique to humans. These trained painting elephants tin take a visual stimulus, even ane that is new to them, and recreate it through creative techniques that they have learned. They capeesh color, perspective, and proportion, at least in the basic sense. I'thou not saying that these elephants are Cézanne, simply they're better than Nathan H. Lents, that's for sure.

In species closer to us, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas have all been taught to draw and paint. Like the elephants, some of them are quite good at it. Unlike the elephants, there is piffling debate that these primates seem to actually enjoy making the art and will do it spontaneously, without reward, and for its own sake. They sometimes make art that they become quite fastened to and never actively testify to anyone else.

In one case over again, I don't want to get into a discussion of what this art creation really says near chimpanzee consciousness, although that is interesting to me. My point here is simply that these neat apes all have the physical ability to create visual representations, they bask doing and then, and the art that they produce seems to hateful something to them. All of those abilities and features were obviously present in early humans and their ancestors besides.

So it was not really that big of a jump when early humans looked upwards at the cave wall, dimly lit past a dying fire... and saw a sail.

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beastly-behavior/201709/why-do-humans-make-art

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