Denis Dutton's essay, Aesthetic and Evolutionary Psychology is a fascinating read that explores some of the ideas that JBI touches on concerning the raison d'etre for art:
http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetic...psychology.htm
5. Evolutionary Psychology: Sexual Selection
While the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection has proved to be one of the most versatile and powerful explanatory ideas in all of science, there is another, lesser-known, side of Darwinism: sexual selection. The most famous example of sexual selection is the peacock’s tail. This huge display, far from enhancing survival in the wild, makes peacocks more prone to predation. The tails are heavy, requiring much energy to grow and to drag around. This seems to be nature’s point: simply being able to manage with a tail like that functions as an advertisement to peahens: “Look at what a strong, healthy, fit peacock I am.” For discriminating peahens, the tail is a fitness indicator, and they will choose to mate with peacocks who display the grandest tails
Fundamental to sexual selection in the animal kingdom is female choice, as the typical routine for most species has males displaying strength, cleverness, and general genetic fitness in order to invite female participation in producing the next generation. With the human animal, there is a greater mutuality of choice. Geoffrey Miller holds not only that sexual selection is the source of the traits we tend to find the most endearingly human-qualities of character, talent, and demeanour — but that artistic creativity and enjoyment came into being in the Pleistocene in the process of women and men choosing sexual partners. The notion that we can alter ourselves through sexual selection is well accepted: there are striking examples of human sexual selection at work even in recent, historic times. The Wodaabe of Nigeria and Niger are beloved by travel photographers because of their geere wol festivals, where young men make themselves up, in ways that look feminine to Europeans, and dance vigorously to display endurance and health. Women then choose their favourites, preferring the tallest men with the biggest eyes, whitest teeth, and straightest noses. Over generations, the Wodaabe have grown taller than neighbouring tribes, with whiter teeth, straighter noses, etc. If it is possible to observe this kind of change in a few centuries, it is clearly possible to remake or refine Homo sapiens in tens of thousands of generations. As with natural selection, just slight choice bias over long time periods could radically reform aspects of humanity, giving us species features of personality and character that we have in effect created for ourselves. Our ancestors exercised their tastes for “warm, witty, creative, intelligent, generous companions’as mates, and this shows itself both in the constitution of our present tastes and traits, and in our tendency to create and appreciate art
It is sexual selection, therefore, that is plausibly responsible for the astonishingly large human brain, an organ whose peculiar capacities wildly exceed survival needs on the African savannahs. The human brain makes possible a mind that is uniquely good at a long list of features that are found in all cultures but are difficult to explain in terms of survival benefits: “humor, story-telling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate language, imaginative ideologies, religion, morality”. From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home entertainment system, evolved to help our stone-age ancestors to attract, amuse, and bed each other.
As a telling example of the human self-created overabundance of mental capacity, consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have up to twenty distinct calls. The average human knows perhaps 60,000 words, learned at an average of ten to twenty a day up to age 18. As 98 per cent of daily speech uses only about 4,000 words, and no more than a couple of thousand words at most would have sufficed in the Pleistocene, the excess vocabulary is well explained by sexual selection theory as a fitness and general intelligence indicator... Indeed, extravagant, poetic use of language — including a large vocabulary and syntactic virtuosity — is associated worldwide with love, being a kind of cognitive foreplay. But it is also... something that can “give a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” It would therefore have been an essential item in the inventory of mate selection criteria.
The human tendency to create amusements, to elaborate and decorate everywhere in life, is therefore a result of mate choices, accounting for the evolution of dancing, body decoration, clothing, jewellery, hair styling, architecture, furniture, gardens, artefact design, images from cave paintings to calendars, creative uses of language, popular entertainments from religious pageants to TV soaps, and music of all kinds. Artistic expression in general, like vocabulary creation and verbal display, has its origins according to sexual selection in its utility as a fitness indicator: “Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time”. This view accords with a persistent intuition about art that can be traced from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Freud: art is somehow connected, at base, to sex. The mistake in traditional art theorizing has been to imagine that there must be some coded or sublimated sexual content in art. But it is not the content per se that sexual: it is the display element of producing and admiring artists and their art in the first place that has grounded art in sexuality since the beginnings of the human race.
To the extent that art-making was a fitness indicator in the Pleistocene, it would have to be something that low-fitness artists would find hard to duplicate. (Were it easy to fake, then it would not be accurate as a gauge of fitness.) The influence of the Pleistocene mind on the concept of art therefore provides us with a perspective, at least at a psychological level, on some of the modern problems of philosophical aesthetic. Consider virtuosity: if music is a series of sounds in a formal relation, why should it make any difference to us that the sounds of a Paganini caprice are also difficult to realize on a violin? From the standpoint of sexual selection theory, this is no issue: virtuosity, craftsmanship, and the skilful overcoming of difficulties are intrinsic to art as display.
And difficulty isn’t all: art also involves costliness. As the economist Thorstein Veblen has said, “The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles”. As much as this might contradict the modernist devaluing of skill and cost as central to the concept of art, it is in line with persistent popular reactions to art, showing up in the liking of skilful realistic painting, musical virtuosity, and expensive architectural details. This may not justify the philistinism of asking how much a famous museum painting is worth, but it does explain it.
Admiration for the ability to do something difficult is not unique to art: we admire athletes, inventors, skilful orators or jugglers; and admiration of skill is at least as intrinsic to art as to any other field of human endeavour . Ellen Dissanayake has identified a process of “making special’ as essential to the arts as practised from the Pleistocene to the present...It follows that almost anything can be made artistic by executing it in a manner that would be difficult to imitate. “Art” as an honorific therefore “connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement”, and so would be useful as a fitness indicator.
If this is true, the vulgar gallery remark, “My kid could paint better than that”, is vindicated as valid at least from the standpoint of sexual selection, and can be expected to be heard in popular artistic contexts for the rest of human time: people are not going to “learn” from their culture that skill does not count (any more than they will learn that general body symmetry does not indicate fitness). Moreover, even with the elites it is really not so different: the skill discriminations of elites are simply accomplished at a more rarefied level. Cy Twombly’s blackboard scribbles, which look to many ordinary folk like, well, children’s blackboard scribbles, are viewed by high-art critics as demonstrating an extremely refined artistic skill. That the works do not obviously show skill to the uninitiated simply demonstrates that they are being produced at a level that the unsophisticated cannot grasp. The esoteric nature of art, and with its status and hierarchy, thus remains in place.
In many ways, this supports JBI's notion of art as competition. I agree that in certain cultures... whether it be ancient Hebrew or Medieval European Christian... there is not so much a striving by the individual artist for recognition... but rather art supports the communally shared values and beliefs, and as such the artists often remain anonymous. One imagines that they don't even think of themselves as "artists" in the contemporary sense... rather they are but master craftsmen whose efforts are put forth in the praise of God for after all, whatever talents they do have were given to them by God and the are but vessels or tools employed by the only true "creator".
It isn't so much about financial rewards as playing within the artistic system of function. Romanticism is just another such function, as is capitalism. Ironically the best authors and poets usually had day jobs - Eliot, editor, Stevens, Insurance Salesman, half of the Western world's art scene (and virtually all of Canada's), Government payroll through educational positions and sponsored grants.
Of course one might argue that there is a direct link between attainment of positions of rank (librarian to the Pope or an influential Cardinal, tenured professor at a major university, etc...) and the reputation of the individual writer based upon his or her writings. We can see this is true of many of the writers of a given degree of notoriety prior to commercialized printing and widespread literacy both of which were necessary for commercial publication. In many ways this is a key difference between the visual arts and literature. The finest art works were always seen as luxury objects that demanded a high price. Any acknowledged "master" (especially under the earlier guild system) would be as assured of a decent living wage in return for his artistic efforts as a licensed plumber, electrician, or doctor might be today.
Now that is our capitalist system, with its root in 19th century publishing. As soon as a book could be sold, it naturally became a product.
Again there remains a unique difference between the marketability of the book (or the work of music) as a product, and the work of visual art. The writer has the advantages and disadvantages of writing for a mass audience. The successful writer, musician, film-maker is capable of reaching a large audience and as such his or her work is seen as having a certain "relevance" to the culture. At the same time, these artists are dependent upon attracting a large enough audience... and there are always questions of pandering to the audience. As JBI suggests, many of the writers, composers, etc... whose works are more "challenging" (ie. less popular with a large audience) are dependent upon day jobs... often related or directly linked to their reputations: professors, lecturers, recipients of government payroll through educational positions and sponsored grants. The visual art object, on the other hand, remains a luxury object... largely reserved for an elite wealthy audience. As such, the visual artists are less responsive to public opinion... but also less relevant.
Two strong novels that deal with questions of the role of the artist in the 20th century in relationship to the desire of the audience and the patrons of power are Hermann Hesse' Glass Bead Game and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. They may be something you might wish to look into, Dark Desire. Neither offers simple answers... but rather posit some provocative questions.
