Thanks for posting this question, Jan. It will be interesting to see what people write here. I asked a related question four and a half years ago; you may be interested in looking over the thread: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Have_primate_species_other_than_Homo_sapiens_engaged_in_acts_of_aesthetic_creation

Fiann Paul posted a link to this video, on the thread I mentioned in my last post here, nearly two months ago. The underwater "land art" this little fish creates is aesthetically potent to humans and, apparently, to females of his species.

"Puffer fish constructs a masterpiece of love," in YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1PID91sEW8, uploaded: 8 December 2016, accessed: 5 September 2019).

Thanks for the link to your related question, David Charles Wright-Carr !

I am also curious about what people will comment to this question.

The puffer fish construction is truly fascinating. I once looked into the literature about his behavior and found no reported evidence of the female paying attention to the - to us - aesthetically pleasing geometry of the construction. I think the authors suggested it rather evolved to influence water flow around the eggs that are laid in the middle. Hence, in that sense, it might be more like a piece of (incidentally aesthetic) engineering than an artwork. Yet, no evidence of female paying attention is not evidence of female not paying attention to it. At this point it appears little is known about this.

You're welcome, Jan. Yes, the puffer fish video leaves the audience hanging in suspense, primed for the love scene that doesn't happen.

Your question leaves the definitions of "art" and "aesthetic" open, and these are at the heart of the matter. If one posits aesthetic experience as an essential ingredient for the culturally constructed (in the modern West) category of art, then the definition of aesthetics becomes the key problem to work out. I suggest that aesthetic experience, like cognition, emerged gradually over the course of the evolution of life, that there is no critical point of emergence, rather a slow process of unfolding over millions of years.

What is aesthetic experience from your perspective?

I agree that the definitions of art and aesthetic are at the heart of the matter. I also think that it is very hard to come up with good definitions of these phenomena.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to explore more inclusive conceptions of art and aesthetics, but in a rigorous, systematic way. I think Prum's (2013) challenge to the common view that art is uniquely human is interesting in this respect:

"Current concepts of art cannot exclusively circumscribe the human arts from many forms of non-human biotic art. Without assuming an arbitrarily anthropocentric perspective, any concept of art will need to engage with biodiversity, and either recognize many instances of biotic advertisements as art, or exclude some instances of human art."

Surely art is in the eye of the beholder? The difficulty that humans have in defining art, or for that mattter, literature, means that there is no clear designation amongst even our species.

The purpose of the puffer fish sand patterns is to attract a mate and is not driven by the same cognitive considerations that human art is, even if human art may in some circumstances serve a similar purpose.

The nebulous questions regarding art would need a clearer definition to be answered by science. Some would define it as something to express a greater meaning, not aimed toward any functionality (more difficult to develop in a world where selection pressures are strong and waste of resources and energy a poor choice). On the other hand, we can maybe see the emergence of human art as a byproduct of our cultural evolution and emotional needs? In that regard the harmonious creation of puffer fishes, or even the amazing architecture of shape and colour of male bower birds might be a fist step toward their own form of art.

see "Bird Seduction Techniques | Life Story | BBC" in Youtube, (https://youtu.be/_H9TyXiXM2k)

David Charles Wright-Carr

David, to tackle aesthetics or the aesthetic experience I think it is useful to use the frame work of signaling theory - at least, in the context of art.

The basic assumption of signaling theory is, based on evolutionary cost benefit logic , that signals evolve because they benefit the sender.

Thus, signals will often have a design component to grab the attention and persuade the receiver to respond, this could be called its aesthetic component. Signals will also often have a info sharing component, this could be called its meaningful component. The latter component is proportional to the amount shared interest between senders and receivers or it is was enforced by receivers.

If art is a set of signals that evolved in this way, which is reasonable, then it could be said that it also has this attention grabbing persuasive component and this meaningful component. Also, it could be said that in comparison with language, art is on average more aesthetic and thus more persuasive and attention grabbing than language which is on average more info sharing and communicative.

In this framework, the aesthetic experience will sometimes rest on preexisting perceptual cognitive affective (un)learned biases of the receiver and sometimes on biases that arose through coevolution with signals of senders.

Alexis Detiege is currently developing a very thorough account of art as a "mere" animal signal and i have build on the signaling theory framework in several projects of mine about art. There I also discuss art as self-exploitation, in which case the sender is also the receiver and therefore art could evolve without delivering benefits. In this scenario art evolves as a byproduct of perceptual cognitive affective (un)learned biases of the sender herself.

How would you describe the aesthetic experience, David?

Thank you for the explanation, Jan. Recently I have been doubting the usefulness of the concept of "art," which is a cultural construct originating in the modern West, for the study and experience of the aesthetically oriented creations of non-Western cultures. The concept of "aesthetic experience" seems to be more universal and applicable to humans and to nonhuman life forms. Aesthetic experiences stand out from the ordinary flow of experience by their intensity, and may be pleasant, unpleasant, strange, sublime, etc.; humans and other forms of life actively seek them out and attempt to provoke them. For now, I am considering "art" as human creations (using visual, musical, and/or bodily languages) with an aesthetic intent, in the modern West and its sphere of influence, and I am attempting to understand pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican art (which is what I have focused on the most) on its own terms, trying to avoid the premises and prejudices of the Western perspective as far as possible. We have turned the material creations of this culture into "art" by putting them in museums and art history books, but in their original context they were much more than "art", forming part of a complex multimodal symbolic system for the collective integration of people into what was understood as a living, sentient cosmos. Embodied cognitive theory, including what we can call bioaesthetics and evolutionary aesthetics, is a productive perspective for this endeavor, transcending traditional concepts and methodologies from art history and semiotics. A preliminary study to test the usefulness of the embodied paradigm for understanding Mesoamerican aesthetic creations was presented nearly two years ago in a congress in Irvine, California and is available on ResearchGate; it explores how primate fear of snakes, and their special ability to detect snakes, were exploited by the ancient Mesoamericans to produce unusually intense aesthetic experiences in viewers, and how these works can transcend the deep cultural chasm that separates us from them:

Conference Paper Sacred reptiles and native worldview: enactive aesthetics in...

David Charles Wright-Carr Dear David, thank you for the link to your article and for sharing your thoughts on the concepts of art and aesthetics. Your concept of the aesthetic experience seems intuitively right. At first sight, a potential downside of the concept, for the purpose of answering the discussion question, might be that it is very hard to measure and establish its existence in other animals. Would you agree?

Jan: I agree that detecting and measuring aesthetic experience is difficult, in human and nonhuman animals, but whenever we ask a question in the realm of cognitive experience we face a challenge. If experimental research were to be carried out, it should begin with a tighter definition of aesthetic experience for humans, then seek a workable definition for each species under consideration. I suppose this would get progressively difficult the further away we get from Homo sapiens on the phylogenetic tree. I wouldn't rule out the existence of something analogous to aesthetic experience in fungus or plants. Such research would be useful to grasp essential aspects of aesthetics, valid across the web of life, and this understanding could have the potential to allow us to cut through the accumulated misconceptions abour aesthetics found in Western philosophy, most of which involve beliefs in a brain-body or mind-body dichotomy, reflectiing the soul-body dichotomy of ancient and medieval traditions. This would be a very ambitious research agenda indeed. For now, I am taking preliminary and very tentative steps, with undergrad art students, in developing a survey to evaluate aesthetic experiences in humans (I wouldn't say "measure", although we are using numerical scales combined with other indicators, including the location of aesthetic sensations in the body). At any rate, I think a concept like "aesthetic experience" is more amenable to definition and study than that of "art," which comes with a heavier load of social and cultural baggage.

Charlotte Kasner:

Do you mean that everyone should decide for themselves what art is? I do agree that experiencing art is very subjective. But if everybody can just decide for themselves what art is, it seems the term becomes vacuous and no longer meaningful for human interaction. A common solution to this problem is to try to come up with a general description of what art is and then people can disagree about what is good and what is bad art based on their own experiences etc. Would you agree with that solution?

A lot of "artlike" behaviors of other animals serve mate attraction, such as bird-, bat, and whale song. But they also serve other functions such as reinforcing pair bonds or territory advertising and defending, or they may be merely playful behavior such as dolphin bubble ring play. So, just as human art, artlike behaviors of other animals generally serve multiple functions as well. Moreover, several of these functions we have in common. For instance, humans also use art to attract mates, to advertise and defend territory (propaganda art) and out of playfulness.

Marco Bertamini :

Thanks for the suggestion, Marco. What is the main thesis of the book? Does Morris discuss the possibility of nonhuman art as he did for instance in his book from 1962 "The Biology of Art"?

Abel Souriau :

Do you mean that if we want to study art scientifically, we also have work to do with respect to its definition? I agree. I think philosophy (conceptual analysis) and science should work together on this (which is actually already the case; scholars studying for instance "the evolution of art" come from many backgrounds across the sciences and humanities).

Regarding the aims or functions of art in humans (and nonhuman animals), it is perhaps useful to distinguish between proximate and ultimate mechanisms, as classical ethology does. So, the answer to the question to what aim or why we make art can have several orthogonal answers. On the proximate level, we may make art to express greater meaning as you suggested. However, that does not preclude that on the ultimate level, possibly beyond our awareness, art is naturally or sexually selected. Purely hypothetical, say art expresses greater meaning and therefore people are attracted to it. In that case art making may have evolved because it attracts people and in someway this increases reproductive success of the art maker. This would for instance be consistent with the popular mate choice hypothesis of the evolution of art.

David Charles Wright-Carr :

I understand what you are saying about the inconvenient social and cultural baggage of the term art. But maybe we miss something if we got rid of it as a general term including (not only Western modern art, but also ethnic art and prehistorical art etc). In my view, art is partly aesthetic (drawing attention, eliciting curiosity, heightened experience etc) and partly communicative (transfer of valuable info). If we would refrain from using the term art we might neglect this communicative component?

Dear Jan:

I don't think we (the academic community in general) can get rid of the word art, as it is firmly established (for example, I work in a "Department of Visual Arts" and the name of one of the courses I teach can be translated as "Artistic Development: Pre-Hispanic Mexico", although somebody else invented that unfortunate title, with the additional problem that Mexico didn't exist in the pre-Hispanic period, other than as an island kingdom of the Aztecs). Lately I have been experimenting with alternative patterns of lexical signs to think, write, and speak about visual language with aesthetic intent/effect (here I had to dedicate six words to express a similar concept). In pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican languages, there are no words expressing a concept analogous to the modern Western idea of "art" (which as you mentioned is at risk of losing its usefulness after much stretching and bending in the last century or so). In the end, each speaker/writer is free to choose her/his words, and it is important is to provide clear working definitions at the outset of a discourse, to avoid unproductive semantic discussions regarding their potential meanings (please don't get me wrong; I am enjoying this conversation and I find it interesting and useful).

Here is a recent article dealing with Mesoamerican visual language in the colonial period, where I explain why I am avoiding using the word "art":

Article Signs of resistance: iconography and semasiography in Otomi ...

One advantage of speaking of visual language and aesthetic experience rather than "art" is that two potentially separate variables are thus disentangled, allowing a higher degree of conceptual precision in scholarly discourse.

Have you related the Discussion on art, with that of design. Art is connected to inspiration and design to motivation.

David Charles Wright-Carr

Dear David,

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and for your paper (I lived in a Mayan village for a year in Yucatan and got to learn a bit about their cultural traditions and art - very cool). I think I may add a kind of a working definition below my initial question to avoid semantic misunderstandings and discussion.

Very cool indeed; having the opportunity to interact with the native peoples of Mesoamerica is a privilege and a mind-expanding experience.

Daily my colleagues, students, and I grapple with these problematic concepts and their definitions (art and aesthetics) and the latter transform and evolve over time. When looking at the aesthetic productions of native peoples, I often insist that the art/crafts distinction is racist, sexist, elitist, and eurocentric; this highlights some of the problems of modern Western concept of "art" as it is usually understood.

Thanks for posting this question and (including all other participants) for an interesting conversation.

I think that it is inevitable that any appreciation of art will be both objective, or at least collective, and subjective. There are cultural layers of appreciation in which art is created, defined and experienced which form a collective approach, including location which determines whether something is even categorised as art and the subjective experience which cannily be individual.

I once admired) an ageing, rusty wreck of a burned out car in a field which was actually sculpturally interesting and quite beautiful. I much preferred it to the chunk of iron that was imposed in a nearby location in the name of art and which holds no aesthetic or referential appeal for me. Which is art?

Charlotte Kasner

Thank you for sharing your interesting experience and question. I can imagine that the car wreck had aesthetic qualities that surpasses those of the "chunk of iron that was imposed in a nearby location in the name of art".

However, for several reasons, I think "the chunk of iron" is art, while the wreck is (probably) not (yet). Not everything that elicits a strong aesthetic experience is art (e.g., sunset or a mountain), and eliciting a strong aesthetic experience is not a requirement for art.

Thus, I assume that the wreck was not produced to elicit an aesthetic experience nor to communicate anything to us. Its aesthetics is an incidental byproduct of burning out. In contrast "the chunk of iron" was produced to communicate or elicit an aesthetic response in an audience. The intention to communicate is a universal requirement for art (and it is not uniquely human).

The chunk of iron may very well be bad art, but bad art is also art. Aesthetic failure does not constitute a failure to be art (Zangwill 2001) quoted in Prum (2013).

I wrote that the wreck is (probably) not (yet) art, because it would qualify as art, one might argue, if someone burned the wreck out to communicate something through the aesthetics of the wreck. Also, I believe that you are making the wreck (or rather a representation of the wreck, for example by writing about it here) art, by communicating about the meaningful aesthetic experience it elicited in you. But if you did not tell anyone, nothing is communicated and since communication is essential to art, I think it would not qualify as art.

Ah, the tree falling in the wood! I think that we are in agreement, but my point is that the most important thing for humans is the ability to experience an aesthetic appreciation regardless of whether something has been created deliberately as art.

The wrecked car elicited as many social discussions and possibilities for consideration as might a deliberately created art work in a deliberate location - more perhaps of some art. As to what os "bad art": I come full circle: it is surely in the eye of the beholder?

The definition of art that I use is that it has to have intention (I took this from the legal concept of mens rea, the ‘guilty mind’). Thus, if the person who created it thinks it is art then it is art. If the creator didn’t make it as art, then it is not art. This removes from the observer any need to make a judgement as to whether anything ‘is’ or ‘is not’ art. We just accept the intent of the creator and take it from there. This (to me) has the beneficial side effect of removing all ‘animal art’ and child art from the equation.

Ivan Pope interesting suggestion, elegant in its simplicity. Many animals probably have intentions, but they do not have a concept of art and therefore they cannot have the intention to make it as art and therefore it is not art. Problem solved!

The problem with this suggestion is that it does not only exclude animal and child art, but also the bulk of ethnic art because most cultures do not have a concept of art (most cultures do not have a distinct word for art). Even more, the concept of art only arose during European enlightenment and therefore it would also exclude works we generally consider to be art such as sculptures from the old Greeks and the complete works of Shakespeare (see Davies, Stephen, The Artful Species, Oxford University Press, 2012).

In my view, while it would have been convenient to efficiently remove animal and child art from the equation, the conceptual collateral damage (removing ethnic art and Shakespeare and the likes as well) is too big.

That is also a very interesting response and a suggestion that raises an issue that I hadn't considered. My aim really (as a Fine Art graduate originally) is to set a guideline to answer the 'what is art' question in contemporary art. Further, I only really use it to define visual art, so I don't intend to exclude Shakespeare! Obviously the word art has many and broad meanings and can be used for many things. I would turn your point around the other way to see if maybe we have a solution: what do/did these other makers of what we now call art think they were making?

Ivan Pope I think that "I intend to make art" is just one of many possible things that an artists can "think" while making an artwork. Moreover, if they think about this too explicitly, it might cause them to try to hard to be relevant and blindly follow the current trends in the Artworld rather than to find out on their own what would be valuable art.

What all artists may have in common, regardless of whether they have an explicit notion of art, is that they seek to persuade their audiences, try to grab their attention, not primarily with rational arguments as in science, but by enticing them, by eliciting affective responses and experiences. This might even be the case for art that is aimed at transmitting ideas such as conceptual art. I think this might be a boundary condition of art. Because if it crosses that boundary, it becomes something else. It becomes a nonfiction book or a technical drawing.

What do you think when you make art?

Charlotte Kasner Sorry for the delay, this is a reply to your final comment. If I understand correctly, you want to emphasize personal idiosyncratic aesthetic experience as the most important criterion to call something art.

You give the example of a rusty wreck of a burned out car in a field which was actually sculpturally interesting and quite beautiful.

But what about the sun? The trees? The mountains? A city? A human body? They would all be art as well according to your reasoning if we find them sculpturally interesting and quite beautiful (which they often are).

Jan Verpooten - my 'rule of thumb for art' is only intended to settle those arguments which revolve around the question, But is it art? It's not intended to make the artist think anything in particular. It really only operates at the margins, with the 'difficult' stuff. Most art is self evidently intended to be art. I wanted to have a simple rule of thumb when confronting the philistines. 'If the artist says it's art, then it's art. It also helped me exclude a lot of stuff, that I would think of as possibly art, from the conversation. Now we can argue about whether it's good art or not.' I think it's helpful but not central to the process of producing art.

Now it occurs to me that an almost more interesting question is - can an person declare something to be 'Not art' and thus remove it from being art?

Ivan Pope Yes, that's an interesting question, as it provides a different angle on the issue.

Philosopher of art Monroe Beardsley did exactly this.

He famously proposed the theory of art that an artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest. However this raised a glaring question: it does not apply to, for example, Duchamp's Fountain, as this work appears not to have been created with the intention to provide an esthetic experience.

Beardsley's response to this criticism was in effect to declare that Fountain is not an artwork. Rather, he claimed, it is a witty comment on art. If you classify anything that comments on art as art than reviews in the newspaper about art exhibitions will have to count as well. This rebuttal has been heavily criticized in turn.

Apart from this particular case, I think it is also useful to look at this from the population level (cf. Prum). in a given population (i.e., an artworld), which works of art are successful and which are not? Those that are successful arguably have a more established status or higher probability to count as art than less successful ones in that artworld. Then it is also interesting to check empirically what determines the success of artworks in a given artworld. In other words, it might be interesting to do empirical research into the (likely implicit) "theories of art" people hold in an evolving artworld and how they affect the kind of art that is produced in that artworld.

Stephen Sillett sorry for my delayed response. I think the comparison between art and design is indeed insightful. But what do you mean with "Art is connected to inspiration and design to motivation"? Do you mean that art is of a higher creative order than design...?

Jan Verpooten

You be the judge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foahTqz7On4