3.2 The Origin of Art or Homo Aestheticus? Part 1: Pareidolia, Hunter-Gatherer Mimicry, and the Assumptions Hiding in the Word "Art"

“The modern system of art is not an essence or fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old. It was proceeded by a broader, more utilitarian system of art that lasted over two thousand years, and it is likely to be followed by a third system of the arts.”

-Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001)

(What do you think this third system of the arts would look like?)

"...a therianthrope combining a feline body, human hind legs and Oryx horns.”

-Archaeologist Juergen Richter describing a figure painted on a stone slab in Namibia 25 000 years ago (New Excavations of Middle Stone Age Deposits at Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia: Stratigraphy, Archaeology, Chronology and Past Environments, (2010))

"...The artist's gift is of this order. [They are the person] who has learned to look critically, to probe [their] perceptions by trying alternative interpretations both in play and in earnest. Long before painting achieved the means of illusion, [humans were] aware of ambiguities in the visual field and had learned to describe them in language. Similes, metaphors, the stuff of poetry no less than of myth, testify to the powers of the creative mind to create and dissolve new classifications. It is the unpractical [person], the dreamer whose response may be less rigid and less sure than that of his more efficient fellow, who taught us the possibility of seeing a rock as a bull and perhaps a bull as a rock. And artist of our own day, Georges Braque, has recently spoken of the thrill and awe with which he discovered the fluidity of our categories, the ease with which a file can become a shoehorn, a bucket a brazier."

-E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1962)

“The secret of the day and night is in

The constellations, which forever spin

Around each other in the comet-dust;—

The comet-dust and humankind are kin.” 

-Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (973-1057 CE)

See many of the hunter disguises mentioned in this thread (and follow @evolving_moloch/https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/): https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1448229624899457027

Sources/place for discussion: 

https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/xstblv/32_the_origin_of_art_or_homo_aestheticus_part_1/?