Art and Human Nature

bone, so to speak. The concept of human nature unavoidably The reasoning here is straightforward, implies the existence of nearly universal regunamely, that the same global effect is apt to larities across the human species-regularities, have the same cause. If that cause is not ultimlike language use, most probably explicable in ately cultural diffusion from a single source, terms of biology and evolutionary psychology. then we must look elsewhere-to enduring feaThus, linking the arts to human nature implicitly tures of the human organism as it has evolved to promises to connect the arts to long-term, engage recurring adaptive challenges.2 Or, to enduring, nearly universal features of the put the matter more simply, we must look to human frame. That is, if art is rooted in human human nature as at least part of the explanation nature, then it is a response, at least in part, to of why we have art as we know it. elements of our evolved cognitive, perceptual, Moreover, it is not just the fact that we find and emotive architecture that are either necesart distributed globally that suggests a considerasary for social life, or conducive to it, or that are tion of its evolutionary heritage. There is also side-effects from features that are. the related phenomenon that people of different For some, this will sound scarcely exceptioncultures are able to recognize, at rates that are able, since we are prone to say that virtually hardly random, the products of other cultures as every known human culture has what we call artworks. As Stephen Davies notes, "I am arts, including narrative (oral and written), imageimpressed by how accessible to Westerners is making, carving, whittling, sculpting, chanting, much sub-Saharan music, Chinese painting, and dance, song, decoration, acting, mime, and so woven carpets from the Middle East."3 And the on.' And inasmuch as this is a feature of human same sort of cross-cultural recognizability can societies, exemplified across the species, we be observed of non-Westerners in regard to our would expect to find that its explanation-like art; Western mass culture could not be so easily the explanation of our linguistic capacitiesexported were it otherwise. goes rather deep, to something inherent in This, of course, is not to say that the citizens human nature. of disparate societies grasp the significance in Although every known culture appears to their full cultural complexity of artworks from possess art, it is improbable that this can be other societies. Rather, the point is that, to an explained in terms of art's originating in a sinarresting degree, Europeans can recognize a gle location at one time and then being dissemstatue of Ganesha as an artwork without being inated gradually therefrom. Rather, art seems to able to know its symbolic import. Appreciating have sprung up independently in different the meaning of such a figurine, needless to say, locales and at different times, often apart from requires contextual or background knowledge outside influences. But if the world-wide distriof the sort that is available to the untutored bution of art cannot be explained by cultural Westerner only from a participant of the relediffusion, then the alternative that recommends vant culture, or by way of an anthropologist, or itself is that art has its origins in something an art historian. Nevertheless, it remains a