The parasitic nature of art

2016

LITERATURE INDEX………………………………………………………………………..101 beats, body movements, motifs and ideas, which are all a result of making these things more than ordinary. This would result in the artist receiving attentions, sustain interest and create emotion in their audience. She finds that the uncertainties of life lead to emotional investment and is the underlying factor for human invention of religion and its accompanying behaviour expression, which she calls artification: 6 The artfication hypothesis conceptualizes art differently from most other schemes-as a behaviour (artifying), not as the results (paintings, carvings, dances, songs or poems) or their putative defining qualities (beauty, harmony, complexity, skill). By considering human art as something that people do, it is possible to ask what adaptiveness might be. 7 The people in the cave did not paint smiley faces or simple drawings. Why? I find that most of the prehistoric cave paintings are feats of great artistic quality, reflecting an extraordinary high creativity; according to doctor Robin Carhart-Harris et al. 8 the brains of archaic Homo sapiens seem to have been closer to what can be defined as primitive consciousness. Here we could name such concepts as altered states of consciousness (cf. Lewis-Williams' theory of shamanism, chapter 5). The evidence of this will be highlighted in chapters 5 and 6. In the quote from art historian Ernst Gombrich´s Story of Art, which introduces my thesis, he stresses the need of a different frame of mind when it comes to studies of prehistoric artworks. And, as I will maintain, we find such a new approach in Dissanayake's term artification. It is worth to remind ourselves about the choice of words Gombrich uses in the above quote: «there really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists». 9 This quote serve as a backdrop to my whole thesis, and sparks the idea that artists has always been around, while Art, on the other hand, is perhaps an unfit term to what it stands for, although we need to discuss what it could be. I will now list a few reasons why prehistoric art should have a more prominent position in current art history:

Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 1992

Most scholars of art have assumed, since Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection, that at one point humans had no art, for some reason they began to produce it, and since that time this behavior has persisted and often flourished. Attempts to identify the origin of art, however, have generated acrimonious &bate. There is no agreement about which of various objects, produced in widely separated times by a variety of our early ancestors, are the original art objects; and no widely accepted general model for the origin of art has emerged. Much of the acrimony surrounding attempts to identify the origin of art or to increase our understanding about this apparently ancient and universal human behavior stems from our failure to define the term "art" explicitly and empirically. Towards that end, a theoretical &fkition of the visual arts will be proposed and then used in an attempt to identify the origin of art behavior in a population of our early ancestots. The fmt solid evidence of art appears to be the modification of the appearance of the human body-occurring, apparently, during the transition between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. An assumption underlying this article is that humans, like some other species, respond to color and form and that this responsiveness can influence choices. Following from the above, this article argues that art involves the intentional use of color and form to attract attention to a body, object, or message. Artists have used this tendency of humans to respond to color and form to influence social behavior. Social effects of art which may have led to reproductive advantages for the individual will be discussed. Today a healthy suspicion attaches to those attempts, very popular not so long ago, to formulate grandiose theories of beginnings and of universal characteristics of 'primitive' religion or art, but although criticism can be leveled at any and every particular theory of beginnings, beginnings there were [Sandars, 1985, p. 91.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2011

2018

Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigmenta dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment of perception. " Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of "the beginning, " the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured. The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Lévi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very

Composició de diverses teories sobre aspectes de la història i la pràctica de l'art i les activitats artístiques, amb cites d'altres autors i reproduccions dels quadres.

2020

Ancient artifacts such as statues, reliefs, and paintings gave tangible form to knowledge and abstract ideas, making them vivid, convincing, and lasting. At the same time, they emphasized, concretized, and combined only certain aspects of the ideas in question, while reducing or omitting others. The book examines the emergence of artifacts as material manifestations of epistemic elements and the medial conditions of these shaping processes, as well as the effects of the resulting form. It combines case studies from Classical Archaeology with reflections on central aspects of material culture. With this approach, the book offers new perspectives on famous Greek and Roman works of art.

Acta Terrae Septemcastrensis, 2009

This reflection on art and prehistory introduced several author's anthropological concepts on origin of art and its function in prehistory. Initial conceptual construct is the difference between aesthetic and aesthetical cultural views, respectively of aesthetic as a scientific theory (= aesthetics in singular) and aesthetics (plural) as the pleasing appearance or effect of things. The aesthetic view empowers and liberates culture while aesthetical view may limit it. The aesthetic view can be destructured while the aesthetical view needs to be proved. From the perspectives of prehistory, the socioanthropological power-prestige model does not allow to analyze the aesthetic view in its completeness and connectiveness as an essential enculturational construct. It may better explain the interrelation between socialization and aesthetic/aesthetical view. The cultural relation to rocks, minerals, clays and pigments was in fact relation of artists (understood as creative people) to nature in order to interact and create cultural products that in turn connected the people and nature. The art was invented in particular, to connect the gradually self-developing social world with the nature and in such way to make the world look united and complex.

2019

Abstract� Pre-Columbian rock art is still not considered by many as a form of aesthetic expression, and many still do not consider rock art as art. These ideas seem to be sustained by popular notions about the nature of aesthetics and art that have had a particularly unfortunate impact on the study of non-Western and prehistoric art. There seems to be a general acceptance of the Kantian idea that aesthetic expression is about the beautiful, and this has come to define the aesthetic for most people today. In the long shadow of this modernity-a distinctly Kantian Modernity, with a marketplace that reinforces these expectations of art and aesthetic expression-pre-Columbian rock art can indeed seem out of place, even unwanted. But if we consider the critical heritage of Alexander Baumgarten, who coined the term aesthetics and was writing a generation before Kant, we find an aesthetic theory that better reflects art's historical condition. When it is seen in terms of Baumgarten's 'science of sensitive cognition' we gain a much richer formal and aesthetic understanding of pre-Columbian rock art.

According to the French philosopher Alain, art must regain its existence as a real and solid object to counteract deceitful imagination. In line with this view is Yves Michaud's description of the "gaseous" state of contemporary art. Paradoxically, the wide circulation of many 'artistic' products, destined to be consumed and invoke emotions, does not indicate that we are in presence of an important affirmation of ethical and aesthetical values. As it were, the proliferation of aesthetic objects has destroyed the symbolic value of art. The Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia has underlined how the disappearance of the axiological dimension has led art towards imposture and under the yoke of imagination, which both assist the strategies of the demonic. At this point a question arises: is it possible to eradicate the power of the demonic and evil from our existential condition? According to Jung it's impossible. In Castelli's view, the union between art, evil and the demonic has characterized the artistic panorama of the sixteenth century. In the twentieth-century, we owe to Hermann Broch -who brought the raising power of kitsch under philosophical scrutiny − the idea of a complicity between degraded art and evil. Not all scholars agreed that Kitsch represented evil. Many philosophers argued that the growing popularity of Kitsch among the masses posed a problem concerning the demand for art. For this reason, philosophical speculation had better not take a Manichean attitude and reject Kitsch outright, on the contrary, Kitsch should be studied with the aim of transforming the "hunger for art", of which it is a manifestation, into a desire for ethical and artistic values.