Part 6 (1/2)
Part 3.
THE GLORY OF BEING HUMAN.
Chapter 6.
WHAT'S UP WITH THE ARTS?
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
-Louis Nizer.
HOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE ARTS? ARE HUMANS THE ONLY artists? Since we are products of natural selection, what possible evolutionary advantage did they bestow on us? Would a lion pause and think twice about eating your ancestor if he had done a quick little rendition of ”Shuffle Off to Buffalo” in a pair of cobra skin shoes with coconut sh.e.l.l taps? Would a neighboring tribe's army crawling through the brush exclaim to themselves upon seeing your camp, ”Look at how aesthetically placed those logs are! And the fire pit is simply spectacular! What are we thinking? We could not possibly consider knocking out these creative people and taking their leg o' impala roasting on the spit!”
Or maybe art is like the peac.o.c.k's tail. ”Bruno makes the cutest carving instruments out of bones. All the other guys are just a bunch of Neanderthals, but Bruno, he is an artist. I think I'll mate with him.”
Or is it all about status? ”Bruno has the biggest knife collection of anyone. In fact he has a knife made by Gormox. I know, I know, Gormox's knives don't cut anything, and they are misshapen, but there are very few of them around!”
Or perhaps Bruno is curling up for his afternoon siesta when he catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of a snake peeking out at him. He remembers the bedtime story his father had told him about some guy who had seen a poisonous snake, and he had feigned sleep, and just as the snake was...he grabbed it and slammed it against the ground. As he skinned it with his cute knife and thought about some new taps, he considered, ”Hmmmm. Maybe those stories weren't just to put me to sleep after all.”
Or was he the first charming Frenchman? ”Oh, my pet.i.te, slither with me through this cave just around the corner in Lascaux and let me show you my etchings.” Or was art a gift to the G.o.ds? ”If I can get this dance down right, we will be sure to have plenty of good hunting and great weather. I better not screw up and hip when I should hop. That will wreck everything.”
And what about those intoxicating rhythms? Did the tribe that danced together bond better than the tribe who were out of sync? Were they better able to coordinate their hunting? Did the beat of drums work as an aphrodisiac? Was Pavarotti any different from a songbird attracting a mate? Is Mick Jagger another example of a peac.o.c.k's tail, or is there more to the story? Are the arts uniquely human?
Explaining the arts is a conundrum. A superficial consideration would place the arts in the position of frosting on the cake. After everything else is accounted for, then we can think about art. After we create the functional, is the aesthetic merely the extra? ”I've built a chair and now I can sit down. Hmmm, it sure looks boring, maybe I should add a pillow for a splash of color.” After the rent, groceries, clothes, gas, car, insurance, utilities, retirement account, and taxes are taken care of, if there is any left over, then maybe you can consider a movie, a concert, painting, dance lessons, or a theatrical production. But is that really their place? Perhaps the arts are more important. Maybe they aren't the frosting on the cake; maybe they are the baking soda, or the sugar. Maybe they are so much a part of us that once again we take them for granted. Perhaps the aesthetic quality of things is more basic to our sensibilities than we realize, and we ignore it at our peril. Does it belong to the great unconscious part of our brain we are learning more and more about to our amazement? When did art evolve? Is there any evidence of it in other animals or our ancestors? Was it necessary for big brains to develop first for art to appear, or did it contribute to their development?
Obviously many forms of art are unique to humans. Gorillas don't play the sax, chimps don't write plays. Can other animals appreciate art? Will a chimp gaze at the sunset or be enraptured by Rachmaninoff? Does your dog dig the Stones? Do we, as humans need art? Does it help develop our brains? Are piano lessons just as important as history cla.s.s? Should we be spending more money on our children's art education? Should we consider it not frosting, the last thing we spend money on, but a baseline budget item?
Many of these questions are just beginning to be addressed. We will start with a look at what art is. Then we'll see what is known of the beginning of art and what it can tell us about the brains that created it. We'll see what the evolutionary psychologists have to say, and then see what recent neuroimaging studies have revealed.
WHAT IS ART, ANYWAY?.
Can we even define art? One of art's mysteries is brought to our attention by the oft-said phrase ”Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”-or the ear. We can both go to an art gallery, and one of us may have been enraptured while the other of us thinks we've seen a hack job. We may have heard the mumbled comment, ”And she calls this art? I call it garbage.” We can go to a concert, and one of us will think the music sublime, and the other may be on edge and have to get up and leave. One of us may walk into a room and feel warm and relaxed and find it beautiful, while the other may find it tedious and boring, whispering, ”His taste is all in his mouth!” We know instantly whether we like a painting or not. It ”appeals” to us or it doesn't.
Art is one of those human universals. All cultures have some form of it, whether it is painting, dance, story, song, or other forms. We can look at a painting or listen to a symphony or watch a dance recital and understand consciously how much time and effort went into the production, how much practice and education were (or perhaps were not) involved, and appreciate it, but that does not mean we like it. How can we define something about which we have no consensus? On the other hand, don't we all gaze up at a starry desert sky and think it is beautiful? Don't we all find a babbling brook lovely?
Ellen Dissanayake, an affiliate professor in the school of music at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, points out, ”The present-day Western concept of art is a mess.”1 She comments that our notion of art is peculiar to our place and time, and modern aesthetics comes from philosophers who had no knowledge of prehistoric art, or of the widespread presence of art around the world in its many forms, or that we had evolved biologically. Steven Pinker, who has penetrating ideas on just about everything, reminds us that the arts engage not only the psychology of aesthetics but also the psychology of status. In order to understand the arts the two need to be separated, and this is what hasn't been done throughout many of the long windbag discussions about art in the past. The psychology of status plays a major role in what is considered Art. Just like an expensive house and a Lamborghini, an original Pica.s.so on the wall has no utilitarian value but indicates that you have money to burn. Pinker says, ”Thorstein Veblen's and Quentin Bell's a.n.a.lyses of taste and fas.h.i.+on, in which an elite's conspicuous displays of consumption, leisure, and outrage are emulated by the rabble, sending the elite off in search of new inimitable displays, nicely explain the otherwise inexplicable oddities of the arts.”2 Once the fas.h.i.+on, architecture, music, etc., is accepted by the seething ma.s.ses, it is no longer elite and may no longer be considered art with a capital A. Thus, it is impossible to define art if both aspects of its psychology are left entwined, because the accepted definition is constantly changing. However, if we can separate the two, then we can deal with the aesthetic aspect of art. Both Pinker and Dissanayake include in their category of art the common and not just the rarefied products. Your kitchen plates can be as aesthetically pleasing to you as a painting. Aesthetics has little to do with the monetary value of art. In the world of Art, however, it may be beautiful, but if it is a copy, it is worthless.
Pinker goes on to point out that the psychological response to the status aspect of Art is a forbidden topic among art academicians and intellectuals. To them, it is OK to be ignorant of the sciences and math, even though such knowledge would be beneficial to health choices. However, to prefer Wayne Newton to Mozart, or to be ignorant of some obscure reference, is as shocking as wearing your boxers (only) to a black-tie dinner. Your choice in art, your personal preference and knowledge about a leisure time activity, is used by another to make a value judgment about your character. The same does not usually happen in a discussion of hammers or chromosomes. How status became enmeshed in art is one question, and why we find something aesthetically pleasing is another.
BEAUTY AND ART.
There are those who will argue that beauty has nothing to do with art. It must be because they have not separated the two different psychological responses. You don't hear, ”That is the ugliest painting I've ever seen. Let's put it in the dining room.” But while looking at the same awful thing in the gallery, you may hear, ”This is Blah Blah's latest painting, and his last one was purchased by the Getty. I think I'll get this for our New York apartment.” Camilo Cela-Conde, director of the Laboratory of Human Systematics and professor at the University of Islas Baleares, Spain, quotes the philosopher Oswald Hanfling as saying, ”People who visit galleries, read poetry and so on, do it, after all, looking for beauty.”3 Symphony orchestras don't survive by having this response: ”It says here in the Sunday review that this symphony is the most dissonant and jarring piece of music that the critic has ever heard, and he likens it to fingernails scratching on a blackboard. Well that sounds great! Let's go.” We are going to be interested in finding out if there is a universal sense of aesthetics or beauty. Pinker asks: ”What is it about the mind that lets people take pleasure in shapes and colors and sounds and jokes and stories and myths?”2 One dictionary definition of art is: ”Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.”4 Nancy Aiken of Ohio University breaks art down into four components: the artist who makes the work.
the work itself.
the observer of the work, and.
the value the observer places on the work.
The American Heritage College Dictionary gives four definitions of aesthetics. We are going to consider them one by one. The first definition is: ”The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty, as in the fine arts. In Kantian philosophy, the branch of metaphysics concerned with the laws of perception.” We've got philosophers talking about what is beautiful, and they have been talking for centuries. The philosophical discussion starts with Plato's theory that beauty is independent of the observer (although it needs an observer). If something is beautiful, it just is; no one's opinions are necessary. A couple of millennia later, we have Kant, who was concerned with the aesthetic value to the perceiver: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is then a judgment.
Neuroscience can at least study Kant's theories about perception and aesthetic judgments.6 So we have the stimulus (the object or artist or piece of music) and the sensual perception of the stimulus. Next comes our emotional response to the perception of the stimulus, which brings us to the second definition of aesthetics: ”The study of the psychological responses to beauty and artistic experiences.”
The study of psychological responses to beauty has actually been rather spa.r.s.e. Research in aesthetics has suffered the same fate as research into emotion. The behaviorists and the cognitivists have neglected it, and surprisingly, it has also been neglected by the more recent emotion theorists.7 It has been suggested that this neglect has been due to a failure to identify aesthetics as either cognition or an emotion, or even as both: It is an orphan child in the land of psychology. Aesthetics is a special cla.s.s of experience, neither a type of response nor an emotion, but a modus operandi of ”knowing about” the world. It is sensation with an attached positive or negative evaluation. Does this sound familiar? It is like the approachdon't approach information given to the brain before it had language. In fact, I recently heard this statement: ”I like that kitchen, but I can't tell you why. I guess you have to break it down and examine its components to figure it out.”* After the emotional reaction, we get a judgment tempered by either an unconscious (hardwired) or conscious (conditioned by culture, upbringing, education, and inclination) idea of whether we think the input is beautiful.
And that takes us to the third definition of aesthetics: ”A conception of what is artistically valid or beautiful.” Donald Norman of Northwestern University suggests that there are three separate levels of beauty. The surface beauty, which is the immediate visceral reaction, is biologically determined and is consistent in people throughout the world. Then there is beauty in operation or behavior (how that beamer handles on the autobahn). Last is the beauty in depth, in meaning, and implication, which Norman calls reflective. Reflective beauty is conscious and is influenced by the individual's culture, education, memory, and experience-everything that goes into you as a person.8 Thus there are two different types of aesthetic judgment, one visceral and automatic, the other conscious and contemplative.
And finally we arrive at the fourth definition of aesthetics: ”An artistically beautiful or pleasing appearance.” Nicholas Humphrey tackles the question of beauty from the perceptual end by attempting to define the particular perceptual quality that things of beauty have in common. He proceeds by searching for the essence of beauty in the relations formed between the perceived elements. We can listen to a melody and think it is beautiful, but we don't think a B-flat is beautiful by itself, and an A is beautiful, and so on. It is the combination, the relations among the different notes, that are beautiful. But this doesn't really help us out all that much. Sure, we can say the relation is beautiful, but what relations are important? Why are they important? Why isn't an endless trill of B-flat and A beautiful, whereas a quick little flourish of it in the right spot is?
Humphrey calls on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins defined beauty as likeness tempered with difference. Humphrey goes on to build a hypothesis that ”aesthetic preferences stem from a predisposition among animals and men to seek out experiences through which they may learn to cla.s.sify the objects in the world about them. Beautiful 'structures' in nature or in art are those which facilitate the task of cla.s.sification by presenting evidence of the 'taxonomic' relations between things in a way which is informative and easy to grasp.”9 Humphrey is hinting that our ability to make aesthetic judgments is fundamental to learning.
In the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't have neuroscience to help him out, nor did Plato in his day. But things have changed and gotten more interesting. Psychologists Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman, from the University of Bergen, Norway, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, San Diego, respectively, tackle the question of beauty through neural processing. They propose that beauty, as defined by aesthetic pleasure, is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics. The more fluently perceivers can mentally process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. This theory has four a.s.sumptions: Some objects are processed more easily than others because they contain certain features the brain is hardwired to process, which it does quickly, such as symmetry. (These are features we will run into later.) But the ease of processing can also be influenced by perceptual or conceptual priming.
When we perceive something we process easily, we get a positive feeling.
This positive feeling contributes to our value judgment as to whether something is pleasing or not, unless we question the informational value of this input.
The impact of the fluency is moderated by your expectations or what you attribute it to. If you go shopping at Nordstrom and enjoy the piano playing while you are shopping, you are in a positive mood. Then, when you see a red purse you like, you are more likely to buy it because of this positive mood. However, before we enter the store, I might tell you, ”Don't let the piano playing go to your head. They just do that to put you in a good mood so you'll buy more.” Then when you see that purse, you will be more conscious about deciding whether you like it or not.
However, even though there are hardwired preferences due to ease of processing, different experiences can increase processing fluency in novel areas, and new neural connections can be made, all of which will affect aesthetic judgment.10 Your processing fluency can be enhanced by experience. The first time you see a new architectural style, you may not like it, but after you have seen it several times, it begins to ”grow on you.” The beauty of this theory is that it can account for many different findings that have been puzzling. I will return to it a bit later.
Hopkins broke down the aesthetic judgment of a ”beautiful” object into its perceptual and its visual or auditory components, then a.n.a.lyzed what he thought were factors contributing toward making his judgment, implying that these would be universal rules. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman a.s.sume there are some things that are innately easy to process. Norman thinks that the immediate reaction we get to surface beauty is biologically determined. Can science tell us whether there are in fact universal guidelines for aesthetic preferences that are hardwired in our brains?
Are There Universal Components to Aesthetic Judgments?
Do we share some universal preferences for certain components of aesthetic preference with other animals? If so, when did these preferences get channeled into the actual production of art? Can the past help us? Can we pinpoint when art first appeared? I won't keep you in suspense. That answer is no. The point at which our ancestors first perceived a stimulus and made a value judgment that it was beautiful is probably always going to be unknown to us. When did the first primate look up at the sunset and find it magnificent? Did this happen before we diverged from our common ancestor or afterward? Is there any evidence chimpanzees have aesthetic sensibilities? Chimpanzees will have an emotional reaction to some natural phenomena. Jane Goodall describes a waterfall in Gombe National Park where she has observed chimps on several different occasions. After they arrive there, they do a wild dance, which involves rhythmically swaying from foot to foot, and then they sit and watch the water as it falls.11 What is going on in the chimpanzees' brains is unknown. Are they excited, just as a child is excited to go to the beach? Do they feel the emotion of awe? Are they making an aesthetic judgment? (”I like this” does not necessarily translate to ”I think this is beautiful.”) Can they even make aesthetic judgments?
Artistic Chimps?
Some chimpanzees, especially when young, when given pencils or paints have become engrossed in using them, to the point of ignoring favorite foods and turning their backs on other chimps while working on a design. Chimps familiar with drawing have begged for supplies when they see their caretaker in possession of them and have thrown tantrums when stopped while painting. One untamed chimp named Alpha refused to draw with a pointed stick and would reject pencils with dull points. Obviously, some chimps like to draw and are a bit fussy about the results. Chimps also stayed within the boundaries of their paper, and one chimp would mark the corners before starting.12 A series of three paintings by a male chimp named Congo recently sold at auction for twelve thousand pounds.13 Desmond Morris, who studied Congo primarily, as well as the works of other primate drawers and painters, could identify six common principles in both chimpanzee and human art. It was a self-rewarding activity, there was compositional control, there were variations in line and in theme, there was optimum heterogeneity and universal imagery.12 Just as the art of children and untrained human adults across cultures is very similar in its imagery and appearance, the chimpanzee drawings and paintings also were similar to each other. Morris attributes universal imagery in human art partly to similarities in muscular movements of the body and to the constraints of the visual system. As an artist is trained, he gains more control over his musculature, and with practice, Morris suggests, a third influence becomes more p.r.o.nounced-the psychological factor.
However, Congo was not a supreme colorist, as his paintings may suggest. If left alone with the paints, he would mix them all together until he had made brown and then would use that. He was handed brushes that had been preloaded with paint, and when that color was used up, he was handed another color. In order that the researchers might study the calligraphy of the strokes, one color was allowed to dry before another color was given to him, so that the colors and strokes would not blend. If left to his own devices, he would not allow one color to dry but would slap on the next, and the colors and strokes would become muddy. Although he would signal when he was done with a drawing, he would frequently draw on top of it if it was given to him at another time. After completing a drawing or painting, he was no longer interested in it. He wouldn't just look at it for pleasure. The drawing and painting sessions were very short, never lasting more than a few minutes per picture, presenting the question of whether the end of the picture was an aesthetic judgment or simply the end of his attention span, especially since he would draw on top of it at a different session. Interestingly, he would try various techniques, such as urinating on a painting and swis.h.i.+ng the urine around and later using dripped water on a painting for the same effect. He tried using his grooming brush and fingernails on the paints also. Novelty was important. None of the chimpanzees that Morris studied created a recognizable pictorial image.
In discussing compositional control, Morris cites a study done by Professor Bernhard Rensch in Germany, who wondered if animals had pattern preferences. He tested four inquisitive species: two monkey species, capuchin monkeys (Cebus) and guenon monkeys (Ceropithecus), and two bird species, jackdaws and crows. He presented a series of cards with either regular rhythmic patterns or irregular markings.
After several hundred tests, Rensch found that all four species would pick up the regular patterns more frequently. He concluded: ”When choosing between different black patterns on white cardboards the monkey preferred geometrical, i.e. more regular patterns, to irregular ones. It is very probable that the steadiness of the course of a line, the radial or bilateral symmetry and repet.i.tion of equal components in a pattern (rhythm) were decisive for the preference.... Both species of birds preferred the more regular, more symmetrical or rhythmical patterns. In most cases the percentage of preference was statistically significant. Probably this preference is caused by the better 'complexibility,' i.e. the easier comprehensibility of symmetrical and rhythmical repet.i.tions of the same components (Rekurrenzl.u.s.t).”* Morris points out that the vital elements-symmetry, repet.i.tion, steadiness, rhythm-are the basic factors that appeal to the eye in selecting a pattern, but they also appear in the production of patterns. There is a ”positive reaction to order rather than chaos, organization rather than confusion.” We can see from these studies that there is a preference in numerous species for specific types of visual patterns, the same preferences that humans show. It seems that there is a biological basis to the preference for some of the components of pictorial images.
EARLIEST HUMAN ART.
In order to look for the origins of artistic endeavors in our direct ancestors, we need to look at what archaeological artifacts can tell us. Obviously we will never know when the first melody was strung together and hummed merely for enjoyment. Much of decorative art is likewise ephemeral, being in the form of feathers, wood, paint, and clay. We can explore this question only by looking at artifacts that have survived: stashes of dyes, tools, sh.e.l.l and bone beads, and rock art, such as can be seen in the caves of southern France and the wilds of Australia. We will discuss music a bit later on.