How art invented humanity

pprismatic about 21 hours ago 13 commentsRead Article on aeon.co

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Jun8•about 2 hours ago

Thought-provoking article. When the cave painters were at work, they most probably didn’t see themselves as “artists” and of course not scientists, philosophers. That was an age where all those things were together at once, living in a religious state, I think. Little by little, they separated (to sometimes unhappy results). Brings to mind the old myth where humans were both male and female originally, but gods, fearing their power, separated them, leading us to look for our half. Same with art and science, I think.

So while Picasso is perhaps right to say “We have invented nothing “ as quoted in the article when he means art is as old as humans, the realization that something is art, is perhaps invented afterwards.

I also reject the two kinds of art thesis that’s proposed here:

“It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live. … Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art”

Many current artists would lump, say, paintings by Old Masters into this category. Facing the statue of David past month in Florence, it was eye opening how much such a classic statue of a human can move people!

card_zero•about 2 hours ago

? Sentimental means excessively moving, so how is that showing that the statue of David doesn't fit the category (actually here my quibble is with the article, not you), and, just because people miscategorize it in your opinion, how does that mean there's no such category?

Edit: I see the article is laying claim to being properly, meaningfully moved. It seems that by including "sentimental" the article is saying: Through art, we are in touch with the truth and beauty of the mystery of creation itself, but you are just having an unnecessary moment because you saw a cliche.

riazrizvi•about 3 hours ago

_Tools_ have a response to this post.

ChrisClark•about 1 hour ago

is this a broken AI bot?

ricree•about 1 hour ago

Looks like, though a shame if true, since the account is more than 10 years old and presumably had a person behind it at some point.

Isamu•about 3 hours ago

Well this is fun, it is deliberately provocative but maybe not dumb. The title itself is something a literalist engineer (myself) would reject, but is about the development of thought that is reflective, self referential. That’s an interesting train of thought.

So I looked at the author and found: Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice https://www.reclaimingart.com/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-a...

Not sure if I agree but interesting nonetheless.

Towaway69•about 2 hours ago

> deliberately provocative

Is it?

Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants:

> [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’.

Which is also fine, it's not "provocative" or "slopsationalism", it's just a PoV that is different.

There are many sides to a debate, not just mine. It's not black and white, there is much grey that is just as legitimate as your or my PoVs. And any other PoV isn't by default "provocative" and especially not "deliberately" so.

ghurtado•6 minutes ago

> Is it?

Absolutely. It is the nature of sharing radical ideas with the world to be provocative. The range of reactions in this thread alone supports the "provocative" part, and of course it's deliberate. Otherwise you would be saying that the author is not aware of how uncommon these ideas are, which I would find extremely hard to believe.

> It's not black and white

Yet you are so firmly convinced that it's white that your whole comment only talks about why it can't possibly be black. You haven't shared your opinion, all you have done is try to invalidate the one you responded to.

> most folks here are accountants:

But it's not that black and white, remember?

beepbooptheory•3 minutes ago

[delayed]

alchemist1e9•37 minutes ago

Fits the archaeological gap also because Homo erectus controlled fire yet left no art, clothing, or deliberate burials.

QuercusMax•about 2 hours ago

I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth.

We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.

OkayPhysicist•about 1 hour ago

I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas.

When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?

ElProlactin•27 minutes ago

> ...and it's clearly linked to our cognition.

People with global aphasia can still do arithmetic, follow causal reasoning, play chess, pass theory-of-mind tasks, etc. During non-linguistic reasoning, math, music and executive tasks, neuroimaging has revealed that the language centers in the brain are pretty darn quiet.

So the link, and the causal direction if any, is not really known.

krapp•43 minutes ago

My entirely layman and unsupported conspiracy theory about language is that early hominids likely developed complex sign language and some primitive forms of writing now long lost to time, but vocal language only came with the necessary biology.