On Monday, September 27, 1999 2:42 PM QueeneMUSE@aol.com wrote:
>> It has long been my opinion that human artistic behavior is primarily
>> a product of sexual selection, not natural selection. People who
>> can sing, paint, draw, dance, etc. in a very pleasing way give
>> evidence of having sufficient wealth (in the form of leisure time)
>> to be attractive mates.
>
> hey - that's just another way of saying artists are sexy!!!!!
> But isn't that is a *result*, not a *cause* of using one's creative juices
to
> the max?
> Unless you are saying artists are artists 'cause they are horny...
I'm not sure how true the above is. Anecdotally, we see Picasso screwing around -- yet I hardly think his wealth and success measured well against a lot of nonartists, especially those in business such as Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, or Leona Helmsley.
Also, the appeal of art seems to fill some deeper human need. A person with a mate does not necessarily seek out an artist, nor does having a mate or even several make one full of art.
I tend to think Ayn Rand was onto something in her _The Romantic Manifesto_ when she claimed art fills the need of a conceptual mind. As far as we know, no other animals are conceptual -- not to the degree humans are, at least -- and no other animals have art. (Anyone care to debate this point?:) This is a weak argument in her favor. A stronger one is how people react to art while animals do not. And also how young children react to art and how they create art. Their art tends to home in on what they view as essential, such as a child's drawing of a house or a person. She does not draw in every detail, just overall shape and relations, however botched these might be.
Thus, I think art _essentializes_. It grabs what the artist believes -- wittingly or not -- to be relevant and discards the irrelevant, which is why, e.g., most novels don't have scenes of the characters urinating. Typically, that activity is not relevant to the story. (It can be, but usually it's not. For example, _Crime and Punishment_ has no such scenes in it. I daresay it would not be a better novel if it did.) This is NOT to claim the artist always gets it right, but I feel this is the aim and the degree to which the artist pulls it off makes it pleasing -- at least to the degree the consumer of art can perceive it.
The latter is a topic in itself. Rand covered this too. She basically thought the process of artist creation was mirrored in artistic appreciation. It goes something like this. The artist has universals to communicate (again, knowingly or not). She brings them together into a particular form -- such as a poem or a painting. The listener to or reader of the poem and the viewer of the painting are able to see how the particular fits together and from its rendering get those universals.
Rand's own novels and short stories are examples of this, though it might be claimed she's just apologizing for her particular work. However, her idea seems applicable to a lot of art, from Greek tragedy -- Euripides' "Hippolytus" shows us the tension between the demands of different godesses (whether one believes in such things is another matter; Euripides and his audience certainly thought them important, whether literally or allegorically read) -- on.
Now, a natural question to ask, if this is so (and I'm not demanding we believe it to be so; I hope someone will pick apart this idea in case it is wrong:), is how does it relate to Extropianism and transhumanism? I find it easy to see how, though I fear a too literal reading of this will make people on this list think art should then be propoganda -- viz., that we have certain ideas to communicate and our art should completely follow those. My view is, however, that Rand's view is descriptive -- not
prescriptive. That is that one cannot take it and make art -- at least, not art that would be of lasting value at this stage. (As evidence of this, witness how many of Rand's followers scribble out novels, short stories, andpoems, yet little of it ever amounts to anything.)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
See my web site for more stuff on the above: http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/