The New York Times featured a great article, “The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start” by Natalie Angier (what a great name), yesterday about the evolutionary origins of art and the contention that to be human is to be an artist.
Here’s a snippet:
Art, [Ellen Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.
Good article. I don’t think I fully agree that the interaction between mother and child doubles as breeding ground for art- but many studies show the correlation between that and intelligence. That by stimulating the brain at a young age with color, shape and sounds, it is more inclined (subconsciously) to take in more information. An interest for accounting is just as likely to develop as one for art- that’s dependent on the person.
But I will say this- which I understand is somewhat contradictory to what I just argued- my mother did play a part in my love for design by happenstance. When she’s on the phone with someone for an extended period of time, she always takes out a pad of paper and begins to write her name or words from the conversation down and trace over them (and over them, and over them) until you’re left with BEAUTIFUL cursive signatures. She did this without thinking, a way to keep her hands busy and it helped that her penmanship was great.
So now that I’m an adult working as a designer, I have an affinity towards typography. And when people ask me about where I get it from, I do think back to my mother’s marathon phone calls and ‘works of art’ it produced.
You can say I get my love for interiors and architecture from my mother too, but I chalk that up to being gay. Thanks evolution!
I practice my penmanship when I’m bored too. People at work find it rather strange and fascinating that I’ll cover entire sheets of paper with the same word or a sentence. It’s something idle to do to occupy my mind during long stretches of boredom.