The origins and purpose of art
Following up on yesterday’s post about beauty and the brain, here’s an article from the New York Times about why humans create art. Natalie Angier writes about a symposium on art and evolution that took place recently. Among the theories that attempt to explain why we have art and how we began creating it, she mentions one I hadn’t heard before: Perhaps the roots of art lie in the interactions of mothers and babies. Independent scholar Ellen Dissanayake argues that the special use of language (motherese) and the reciprocal gestures and other interactions between mother and child may represent the building blocks from which art was created. It’s an intriguing hypothesis, and obviously I need to read some of Dissanakaye’s work. (It’s always good to see such a successful independent scholar.)
