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Art for Life's Sake

a
Ellen Dissanayake
a
New York City, NY
Published online: 27 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Ellen Dissanayake (1992) Art for Life's Sake, Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy
Association, 9:4, 169-175, DOI: 10.1080/07421656.1992.10758958

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 Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy kcciation, 9[4) pp. 169-175 0 MTA. Inc. 1992
Art for Life’sSake
Ellen Dissanayake, New York City, NY
I don’t know which is greater-the pleasure,
honor, or privilege of being invited to address the
members of the NAEA. I hope that the title of my
lecture, “Art for Life’s Sake,”-like the question of
the title of my book, What Is Art For?-will stimu-
late you to think about art in a new way, as well as to
appreciate why thinking about art in a new way is
important.
I intend to give a brief history of Western art-
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not the usual “art history” of the practice of art but
rather a history of the Westen idea of art-and then
present my own view of art for life’s sake. This arises
from an unfamiliar perspective, one that is so differ-
ent, in fact, that it doesn’t have a name. In order to
call it something, I have occasionally called it “pal-
aeoanthropsychobiologica1”-an adjective that is
quite literally stunning-to suggest several things.
First, that the idea of art encompasses all of human
history (i.e, as far back as the Palaeolithic or even
earlier); second, that it include all human societies
(i.e., is anthropological or cross-cultural); and third,
that it accounts for the fact that art is a psychological
or emotional need and has psychological or emotion-
al effects. Most people would probably agree that
their personal “idea of art” includes all these things,
but I will show you that as presently practiced and
taught in the West, art is a conceptual ragbag or cas-
serole full of the most incompatible and confusing
notions.
My palaeoanthropsychobiologicalview is that in
order to include human history, human cultures,
Editor’s note: Ellen Dissanayake earned her B.A. in Humanities
from Washington State University and has her M.A. in Art Histo-
r y from the University of Maryland. In 1977, she received a grant
from the Guggenheim Foundation to pursue research at Oxford
University on the evolutionary significance of art. She has recently
received a Fullbright LecturinglResearch Fellowship to continue
her studies in Sri Lanka.
Dissanayake’s work has been significantly influenced by the
years she has spent in such places as Sri Lanka, India, New
Guinea, and Nigeria. Currently, she lives in New York City
where she is a lecturer for the New School of Social Research. She
has published two books, What is Art For? and Homo aestheticus
(which is reviewed in this issue of Art Therapy).
169
and human psychology, art must be viewed as an in-
herent universal (or biological) trait of the human
species, as normal and natural as language, sex, so-
ciability, aggression, or any of the other charac-
teristics of human nature.
Before beginning, I would like to tell you how I
came to develop this view, why it came to seem
mandatory. While a graduate student in art history,
writing my thesis on 19th-century French symbolist
art, I had the unexpected opportunity to travel to Sri
Lanka, the small island nation off the southern tip of
India, formerly known as Ceylon. Eventually I re-
turned there to live and married a Sri Lankan man.
For 15 years I lived abroad, and during that time
also spent a year in Nigeria, two and a half years in
Papua, New Guinea, and three months in India.
Living in non-Western countries permits, indeed de-
mands that you look afresh at all the cultural truths
and beliefs that you have grown up with and taken
for granted. Among these of course was my idea of
art.
Living in another culture also makes you realize
that different as other people’s beliefs may be from
one’s own, we are all still recognizably people-and
so you wonder what is universal. M y way of ap-
proaching these questions came to be biological or
evolutionary-looking at all humans as members of
one species and then thinking of art as a kind of be-
havior that developed as they evolved, to help them
survive. It took many years of reading and thinking
and writing to address the different aspects of this
approach. I am still finding new paths to follow and
new things to incorporate. In 1988 I published a
book, What Is Art For?, that set out my general
ideas, and a second book which is called Homo Aes-
theticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992). I
think these ideas have revolutionary implications for
how we as a society think of art. Indeed, one of the
major insights to come from my studies was just how
peculiar our Western concept of art is-unprece-
dented in human history, and I think it is extremely
important to understand this in order to see why a
new view of art is required.
 ART FOR LIFE‘S SAKE
Thus I will first outline how our peculiar or
anomalous Western concept or idea of art has devel-
oped over the past two centuries, before setting out
my palaeoanthropsychobiological view of the human
species, a species that deserves to be called aesthet-
icus or artistic as much as it deserves to be called sa-
piens or wise.
Development of the Western
Concept of (Fine) Art
It is true that we can read about the word and
concept “art” in early treatises from Greek and me-
dieval times. But it must be realized that these are
translations and that the authors may not have meant
the same thing by the word “art” as we do. In fact,
Plato did not discuss “art,” but rather beauty, poet-
ry, and imagemaking; Aristotle dealt with poetry and
tragedy. They used a word, techn6, which we have
translated as “art,” but this word was applied equally
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to fishing, chariotdriving, and other mundane activi-
ties. It meant “having a correct understanding of the
principles involved,” rather as we understand the
“art” of salmon cookery or of motorcycle mainte-
nance.
In medieval times, the arts were in the service
of religion, as they have always been, but were not
regarded “aesthetically,” if this means separately
from their revelation of the Divine. Renaissance art-
ists gradually replaced God-centered with man-cen-
tered concerns, but their works continued to portray
a recognizable world, whether actual or ideal, and
the “art” was in accurately representing that subject
matter, using craftsmanlike standards of beauty, har-
mony, and excellence.
The eighteenth century is recognized today as
having been a focal point in which a number of social
and intellectual trends came together, intertwined
and influenced one another, and eventually became
in combination and intensity what is now called
“modernity.” Among these trends I will mention-
and I hope you will forgive the rather breathtaking
oversimplification-five important and unprece-
dented changes. (1)A gradual secularization of soci-
ety, whose aim became life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness for individuals rather than acquiescence
to a humanly unknowable Divine plan. (2) The rise
of science which not only fostered questioning and
dissent but made possible the development of tech-
nology and industrialization. (3) The social or inter-
personal changes that resulted as the emotional and
affective ties of feudal and kin loyalty were replaced
by instrumental relationships based on the exchange
170
of money. (4)an emphasis on reason as the best
means for understanding and controlling the matters
of life. and ( 5 ) the great political revolutions in
America and France with their subsequent division
of society into workers and bourgeoisie and gradual
weakening of the nobility and clergy.
What we now call “the Romantic Rebellion” was
a reaction to the goods and evils inherent in these
great changes. For example, while individualism be-
came possible and people could be freed from tradi-
tion, custom and authority, they also became more
alienated from their work and from other people.
New possibilities for thought and experience were
accompanied by an unprecedented loss of certainty
and security about one’s place in the world. New
comforts and conveniences arose, but people also
became more regimented in their work and gradu-
ally removed from the world of nature. While reason
and critical analysis encouraged objectivity and fair-
ness, earlier visionary and mythopoetic modes of
thought were devalued, being nonlogical, although
their expression in communally shared traditional
practices had given great emotional satisfaction.
To artists, as t o everyone, t h e new o r d e r
brought both liberation and insecurity. As the nine-
teenth century advanced, their primary patrons were
no longer the Church and the court. Instead it be-
came necessary to please the public-multiform,
faceless, swayed as today by hype and novelty-in
what was to become an art market. Aspiring artists
no longer were apprenticed in a guild system, but
learned what standards were acceptable from newly-
established national academies and collections in na-
tional museums. Private dealers and galleries ap-
peared to intercede between artists and the public.
Professional critics who wrote for newspapers and
newly-established magazines of art contributed to
the new milieu as did schools of art and scholars of
art who established their field as a sequential and
developing history of particular works of art that
every well-educated person should know. The words
or concepts of “art,” “genius,” “creativity” and
“imagination” took on their modem meanings.
Modernism:Art as Ideology
Included in the many new approaches and sub-
jects that 18th century thinkers turned their atten-
tion t o was a s u b j e c t t h a t c a m e t o be called
“aesthetics”-a concern with elucidating principles
such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and
indeed make them not simply paintings or statues
but examples of (fine) “art.”
 DIWNAYAKE
As the subject developed over the next century,
a startling and influential idea took hold that, like
the concept of “art,” was unprecedented. This was
that there is a special frame of mind for appreciating
works of art-a “disinterested” attitude that is sepa-
rate from one’s own personal interest in the object,
its utility, or its social or religious ramifications. The
work of art became a world-in-itself, made solely or
primarily as an occasion for this kind of detached
aesthetic experience, which was considered to be
one of the highest forms of mentality.
“Disinterest” implied that viewers could appre-
ciate any art, even the artwork of eras or cultures far
removed from their own, whether or not they un-
derstood the meaning the works had for the people
who made and used them. I n this sense, art was
“universal.” Another corollary was that works of art
in themselves, apart from their subject matter, gave
a special kind of knowledge-a knowledge which,
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with the waning of religious belief, often took on the
spiritual authority once restricted to the Church.
Still another was the idea of art for art’s sake (or even
life for art’s sake), suggesting that art had no purpose
but to “be” and to provide opportunities for enjoying
an aesthetic experience that was its own reward, and
that one could have no higher calling than to open
oneself to these heightened moments.
As paintings became less and less like mirrors
held u p to nature, so that viewers could no longer
d e c i p h e r o r naively a d m i r e t h e m , c r i t i c s as
mediators increasingly had to explain to the public
what made an artwork good or bad and even what a
work “meant.” In England, in the early decades of
the twentieth century, Clive Bell and Roger Fry
were extremely influential as they invoked “for-
malist” criteria for appreciating the puzzling new
work of Post-Impressionists such as Ckzanne, or the
Cubists-work that could not be understood with
the serviceable old standards (that anyone could rec-
ognize) of beauty of conception, nobility of subject
matter, representational accuracy, or communication
of valued truths. Art had become if not a religion, an
ideology whose principles were articulated by and
for the few who had leisure and education enough to
acquire them.
In the mid-twentieth century, more elaborate
and abstract formalist standards were developed in
America by critics like Clement Greenberg and
Harold Rosenberg in order to justdy abstract expres-
sionism, a school of painting that affronted sen-
sibilities and challenged what had previously been
acceptable as art. “Flatness,” “purity,” and “picture
plane” became the verbal tokens of the transcendent
171
meanings viewers were told they could find in the
skeins and blobs and washes of paint. Because these
values were not easily apparent to the untutored ob-
server, appreciating art became more than ever an
elite activity, requiring an apprenticeship and dedi-
cation not unlike that of the artist. Never in question
was the “high” art assumption that works of art-no
matter how strange they looked or unskilled they
seemed to be-were conduits of transcendent mean-
ing, of truths from the unconscious, expressions or
revelations of universal human concerns that the art-
ist was uniquely endowed to apprehend and trans-
mit.
As the “isms” proliferated and art became more
esoteric and outrageous, the role of the critic be-
came not only helpful but integral to the reception of
works of art. Looking back, it seems inevitable that
an “institutional” theory of art arose to explain what
art is. As formulated by philosophers of art like
George Dickie and Arthur Danto (who were describ-
ing what was the case, not advocating or defending
it), an artworld (one word) composed of critics, deal-
ers, gallery owners, museum directors, curators, art
magazine editors, and so forth, was the source of
conferring the status “work of art” onto objects.
What artists made were “candidates for apprecia-
tion,” and if the artworld bought and sold them,
wrote about them, displayed them, they were there-
by validated as “art”-not before.
Implicit in this account is a recognition that
what is said (or written) about a work is not only nec-
essary to its being art, but is indeed perhaps more
important than the work itself. There is no apprecia-
tion of art without interpretation. We can tell that a
pile of stones or stack of gray felt in a museum is dif-
ferent from a pile of stones on the pavement near a
construction site or a stack of felt in a carpet store
because those in the museum are viewed through a
lens of knowledge of their place in a tradition. “To
see something as art at all,” proclaimed Danto, “de-
mands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artis-
tic theory, a knowledge of the history of art.” In this
view, there are no naive artists or naive art. Today’s
artists can both explain t h e theories behind the
works that are to be seen in museums and galleries
and place their own works in these traditions.
Postmodernism: Art as
Interpretation
The assumption that interpretation is indispens-
able to appreciating and even identifying artworks
 ART FOR LIFE‘S SAKE
has opened a Pandora’s box that is now called “post-
modernism,” a point of view that calls into question
two centuries of assumptions about the elite and spe-
cial nature of art. While the term “postmodern” is
used (and abused) as indiscriminately as “modern”
was before, postmodernists are united in repudiating
the “high” art (or modernist) view I have just de-
scribed. They stress that theirs is not just one more
“ism” or movement but rather a declaration of the
end of all isms and movements. Theirs is a radical
change of consciousness, they claim, that challenges
the entire “modernist” ideology.
Rather than assuming that art reflects a unique
and privileged kind of knowledge, postmodernists
point out that any “truth” or “reality” is only a point
of view-a “representation” t h a t comes to us
mediated and conditioned by our language, our so-
cial institutions, the assumptions that characterize
individuals as members of a nation, a race, a gender,
a class, a profession, a religious body, a particular
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historical period. Artists, just like everybody else, do
not see the work in any singularly privileged or ob-
jectively truthful way, but rather-like everybody-
interpret it according to their individual and cultural
sensibilities. What has been enshrined as “high” art
is then to the postmodernist view a canon of works
that represent the worldview of elite, Western Euro-
pean, white males. Hence “taste” and “beauty” and
“art for art’s sake” are constructions that express
class interests. To claim that o n e can appreciate
works from alien cultures is an imperialistic act of
appropriation-molding them to one’s own standards
while blatantly dismissing or ignoring the standards
of their makers and users. Art is not universal, but
conceptually constructed by individuals whose per-
ceptions are necessarily limited and parochial.
Finding that modernist aesthetics masked chau-
vinistic, authoritarian, and repressive attitudes to-
wards uneducated, non-Establishment and non-
Western people, and towards women, postmodernist
artists have thus set out deliberately to subvert or
“problematize” the old “high” art standards, often
parodying or otherwise flouting them. For example,
enduring “timeless” works of art are replaced by in-
termittent or impermanent works that have to be ac-
tivated by the spectator or cease to exist when the
performance is over. Or, challenging the aura of ex-
clusiveness and religiosity of the museum, art is cre-
ated on the street, in remote deserts, or found in
humble or trivial objects and materials. Postmoder-
nist artists deny the integrity of individual arts by
using hybrid mediums-sculptures made of painted
canvas, or paintings made of words and numbers.
172
The uniqueness, authority, ideality and originality of
high art is challenged by borrowing (copying, pho-
tographing or otherwise appropriating) images from
past art to be used in new works, or by making many
repetitions or reproductions of an image or construc-
tion. Pastiche and collage are popular postmodern
media in which works are composed of fragments
that have no apparent relation to one another except
for their juxtaposition.
Although the art praised by postmodern critics
is puzzling, if not shocking and offensive, the social
problems and cultural predicaments it reflects can-
not be denied. The works and ideas that are called
postmodernist can be lamented or ignored, but like
modernism’s works and ideas, they certainly reflect
the society that spawned them. After the political ca-
lamities and barbarisms of the twentieth century,
the Enlightenment and Victorian faith in human in-
telligence and goodness or in the progress and per-
fectibility of human existence seem as antiquated
and untenable as medieval theology. Socialism and,
more recently, other underclass movements have
challenged pretensions to achieving objective, uni-
versal justice, law, and morality-as have the recur-
rent scandals at the very heart of government. After
Freud it is hard to believe that objective rationality
alone could drive human affairs, a hope also laid to
rest more mundanely by the success of glossy adver-
tisements that effectively persuade us to overspend
on ever new and tantalizing non-necessities. Rela-
tivity theory in physics at least suggests the theme of
relativity elsewhere. The polluting fungoid spread of
the automobile and its concrete accoutrements of
freeway and parking lot over city and landscape, not
to mention other even worse environmental ills, cer-
tainly calls into question the wisdom of human tech-
nological domination over nature. The proliferation
of images in advertisement and on television makes
all events-from an exciting new dentifrice or room
freshener to a fire in the Bronx, a missile attack on
Tel Aviv, Johnny Carson’s monologue, a famine in
Africa, the Super Bowl, or an earthquake in Peru-
appear equally real (or unreal), occurring as they do
in succession, compressed in time and space and sig-
nificance. The postmodernists’ exposure of the rigid,
exclusive and self-satisfied attitudes that often lay
behind the rhetoric of modernist ideology is, in large
measure, welcome, as is their preparing the way for
the liberation and democratization of art.
But I find postmodernist aesthetics troubled and
inadequate when it proclaims that there are a multi-
plicity of individual realities that are infinitely inter-
pretable and equally worthy of aesthetic presentation
 DISSANAYAKE
and regard. The question arises: if everything is
equally valuable, is anything worth doing? Is sprawl-
ing promiscuity really an improvement on narrow
elitism? Is absolute relativism a more credible posi-
tion than absolute authority? Postmodernism aban-
dons the crumbling edifice of modernist authority for
an equally uninhabitable and esoteric antistructure
of relativism, cynicism, and nihilism that I claim
does not have to be the inevitable outcome of the
matter.
Art for Life’s Sake
One way to begin to understand and resolve the
perplexing contradictions, inadequacies, and confu-
sions of both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics
is, I believe, by considering art in the broadest pos-
sible perspective-the palaeoanthropsychobiological
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view that I mentioned-as a universal need and
propensity of the human species.
Let me now jettison that tongue-twisting phrase
and introduce a synonym, “species-centered. As ” ernism’s proclamation that art is of supreme value
medieval society and art was God-centered, that of
the Renaissance man-centered, and ours perhaps
best described as profit- or commodity-centered, I
hope that a more human future society and art will
be species-centered-that is, will regard all humans
as alike in having the same fundamental needs.
For my purposes here with you as art edu-
cators, I would like to point out that one of the most
striking features of human societies throughout histo-
ry and across the globe is a prodigious involvement
with the arts. Even nomadic people without perma-
nent dwellings and with few material possessions
usually have elaborate poetic language or dance
styles; more settled people generally decorate their
dwellings, objects of daily or ritual use, or them-
selves. There is no known society that does not prac-
tice at least one of what in the West we call “the
arts,” and in many groups art-making is among their
most important endeavors.
I find it significant that the word “art” acquired
its modern meaning and its existence as a concept as
the arts themselves became practiced and appreci-
ated by fewer and fewer members of society. In
small scale, unspecialized, premodern societies, in-
dividuals can generally make and do everything that
is needed for their livelihood. There, while there is
no abstract concept of “art,” everyone may be an art-
ist-decorating their bodies and possessions, danc-
ing, singing, versifying, performing-even when
some persons are acknowledged as being more tal-
173
ented or skillful than others. In these technologically
simpler societies, the arts are invariably and insep-
arably part of ritual ceremonies that articulate, ex-
press, and reinforce a group’s deepest beliefs and
concerns. As the vehicle for group meaning and a
galvanizer of group oneheartedness, art-conjoined-
with-ritual is essential to group survival-quite liter-
ally art for life’s sake.
In a highly-specialized society like ours, the arts
are also specialties and may exist for their own sake
apart from ritual or any other purpose. This separa-
tion, peculiar only to modernized or “advanced” so-
cieties, makes art a problem. Art’s heritage of spe-
cialization and self-proclaimed irrelevance permits it
to be dismissed by school and governmental budget-
makers as a “frill,” while its aura of sanctity and priv-
ilege remains as a reproach to those whose upbring-
ing has not included exposure to “fine” arts.
Dismissal, ignorance, irrelevance, and exclusivity of
art are all artifacts of our own peculiar cultural pre-
dicament and not inherent in arts anywhere else.
The species-centered view of art combines mod-
and a source for heightened personal experience
with postmodernism’s insistence that it belongs to
everyone and is potentially all around us. It does this
by thinking of artmaking and experiencing as a
human behauior. Let me explain.
In the evolution of the human species, not only
did we gradually acquire certain characteristic phys-
ical and physiological adaptations-such as upright
posture, an opposable thumb, relative hairlessness, a
nine-month gestation period-but behavioral adapta-
tions as well. Even though we no longer live in a
hunter-gatherer milieu, these behavioral predisposi-
tions still characterize us as a species in their high
degree of development and interrelatedness: tenden-
cies to be sociable, to acquire and use language, to
make and use tools, to impose conceptual order, to
attempt to control or regularize the forces of nature,
to join with our close associates in mutual endeavor.
Among these tendencies, I claim, is also the behav-
“
ior or propensity to make special,” particularly
things that one cares deeply about or activities
whose outcome has strong personal significance.
Something that is “special” is different from the
mundane, the everyday, the ordinary. It is extra-
ordinary. Now all animals can tell the difference be-
tween the ordinary or routine and the extraordinary
or unusual. They would not survive if they were
oblivious to the snapping twig or sudden shadow
that means a predator may be nearby. But when
joined with the other abilities that evolving humans
 ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE
had-intelligence, resourcefulness, emotional and
mental complexity, the ability to plan ahead-the
“special” could take on a significance that was more
than simply alertness to possible danger.
We have to speculate about how early this
propensity to recognize specialness arose, but it was
at least 250,000 years ago-more than ten times ear-
lier than the cave paintings that are usually called
the “beginning of art”-in Homo erectus and early
H o m o sapiens.
The crucial factor for claiming the beginning of
a behavior of art, I believe, would have been the
ability not just to recognize that something is spe-
cial, but deliberately to set out to make something
special. This also seems to have occurred at least
250,000 years ago. In a number of sites from that
long ago, and thereafter, pieces of red coloring mate-
rial have been found, far from the areas in which
they naturally occur. It is thought that these were
brought to be used for coloring and marking such
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things as bodies and utensils (which would have now
of course perished without trace), as people continue
to do today-to make them special. There is also evi-
dence of cranial deformation as early as 70,000 B.C.
and toothfiling and tooth decoration were also prac-
ticed. These may not seem like “art” but they d o
show the wish to use form and color to “make spe-
cial.”
I suggest that to our ancestors it was essential
not only to make good tools-spears and arrows for
the hunt-but to make sure they worked by making
them and the activities that were concerned with
them special. In hunting societies that we know of
today, behavior made special (or “controlled” behav-
ior) is as much a part of preparation for the hunt as
readying spears or arrows. Before the hunt, hunters
may fast, pray, bathe, obey food or sex taboos,
participate in special rituals, wear special adorn-
ment.
This control of their behavior and emotions can
be interpreted as a way of vicariously demonstrating
the control they desire in order to successfully
achieve their goal. And although “behavior made
special” need not be aesthetic or artistic, when one
exerts control, takes pains, and uses care and con-
trivance to do one’s best, the result is generally what
is called artistic or aesthetic.
Along with control of one’s behavior-making it
special by shaping or elaborating it-would go mak-
ing important tools and implements special, showing
one’s investment in their working properly, one’s re-
gard for their importance. Weapons and tools would
be prime candidates for being made special.
174
It is in ritual ceremonies where one sees the
arts most profusely in traditional societies and where
I believe the nascent tendency to make special
would have had the opportunity to diversify and
flourish. Ritual ceremonies are group efforts to con-
trol the important things that people care deeply
about-not only acquiring food but averting evil,
curing illness, securing safety and prosperity, and
resolving conflict. While rituals are unique in form
and content in each society, they occur in response
to strikingly similar circumstances-times of uncer-
tainty, often of transition between one material or
social state and another (e.g., plenty and want; dis-
ease and health; childhood and sexual maturity; un-
married and married; life and death).
I believe it is no accident that the arts are found
prodigiously in ceremonial rituals and the parapher-
nalia associated with these ceremonies. In fact, I
claim that the shaping and elaborating of behavior
and of the material world that we today call the arts
were necessary to the performance of ritual cere-
monies. First, they made the ceremonies pleasur-
able so that people wanted to d o them and would
continue to do them, and they also made them com-
pelling and memorable so that they “worked.” The
group participation in a common endeavor and the
communally-shared emotion would strengthen the
general cooperation and feeling of affiliation that was
essential for small bands of people to survive in a vi-
olent, unpredictable world.
One can then say that to begin with art was not
for its own sake at all, but for the sake of the per-
formance of ritual ceremonies. What was important
to the survival of early human society is not that dec-
orating bodies or dancing in imitation of an ostrich
would bring rain or create more game-although the
group members certainly would have thought that
was what they were doing. Rather it was the emo-
tional bonding of the participants that gave the cere-
monies survival value. The making special, the
touching of or entering an extraordinary realm that
making special encouraged and allowed, the unifying
self-transcendent emotions that were called forth,
demonstrated the likemindedness, the onehearted-
ness of the group so they would work together in
confidence and unity. As human life evolved and be-
came more complex, ceremonies and arts would be-
come more complex as well. They would be used to
assist the transmission of group tradition and infor-
mation, as John Pfeiffer has so brilliantly shown in
his book, The Creative Explosion, which deals with
the emergence of Stone Age art.
For these reasons-unification, passing on cul-
 DlSS4NAYAKE
tural knowledge-individuals in human societies
where ceremonies were performed would survive
better and leave more off-spring than those who did
not. And being crucial and intrinsic to ritual cere-
monies, the arts were crucial and intrinsic to human
survival-art for life’s sake.
To think of art as a behavior of making special is
truly a change of paradigm. Usually art refers to ob-
jects-paintings, pictures, dances, musical composi-
tions, works of art that are the result of artistic be-
havior. Or the appellation “art” is given to objects
that possess some quality-of beauty, harmony, ex-
cellence-and denied to those that do not. Yet if art
is regarded as a behavior, making things special, em-
phasis shifts from the object or quality or commodity
to the activity (the making or doing and appreciat-
ing), as we see in premodern societies where the ob-
ject is essentially an occasion for or an accoutrement
to ceremonial participation.
“Making special” is a fundamental human pro-
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clivity or need. We can see it in such simple things
as when we cook special meals and wear special garb
for important occasions, and find special ways of say-
ing important things. Ritual ceremonies are occa-
sions when everyday life is shaped and embellished
to become more than ordinary. What artists do, in
their specialized and often driven way, is an exag-
geration of what ordinary people also do, naturally
and with enjoyment-transform the ordinary into
the extra-ordinary. Looked at in this way, art, as
making the things one cares about special, shaping
and elaborating the ordinary to make it more than
ordinary, is fundamental to everyone and, as in tra-
ditional societies, deserves to be acknowledged as
normal-encouraged and developed.
To suggest that art is more common and wide-
spread than has usually been supposed does not
have to mean that all standards fly out the window
and anything goes. (Indeed, even with the idea that
art is uncommon and rare, that has already hap-
pened.) Nor does it imply that it is trivial and care-
less. To make something special, after all, generally
implies taking care and doing one’s best so as to pro-
duce a result that is-to a greater or lesser extent-
accessible, striking, resonant, and satisfying to those
who take the time to appreciate it. This is what
should be meant when we say that via art, experi-
ence is heightened, elevated, made more memora-
ble and significant. Thus everything is not equally
meaningful or valid. The reasons that we find a work
accessible, striking, resonant, and satisfying are bio-
logically endowed as well as culturally acquired.
175
They are not merely a matter of playful and shifting
interpretations.
Although “Art” as a concept seems to have been
born of and sustained by a commercial society, is
therefore only roughly two centuries old, and hence
is relative, even discardable, it should not be forgot-
ten that the arts have always been with us. So have
ideas of beauty, sublimity, and transcendence, along
with the verities of the human condition: love,
death, memory, suffering, loss, desire, reprieve, and
hope. These have been the subject matter of and oc-
casion for the arts throughout human history, and it
is a grievous lapse when contemporary thought as-
sumes that because art is contingent and dependent
on “a particular social context” that abiding human
concerns and the arts that have immemorially been
their accompaniment and embodiment are them-
selves only contingent and dependent.
The species-centered view of art I have devel-
oped here claims that there is valid and intrinsic as-
sociation between what humans have always found
to be important, and certain ways-called the arts-
that they have found to manifest, reinforce, and
grasp this importance. That the arts in postmodern
society do not do this, at least to the extent that they
do in premodern societies, is not because of some
deficiency or insubstantiality of an abstract concept
but because their makers inhabit a world-unprece-
dented in human history-in which these abiding
concerns are more often than not artificially dis-
guised, denied, trivialized, or banished.
Adopting the species-centered view of art allows
us personally to better appreciate the continuity of
ourselves and our artmaking with nature. Art is not
confined to a small coterie of geniuses, visionaries,
cranks, and charlatans-indistinguishable from one
another-but is instead a fundamental human spe-
cies characeristic that demands and deserves to be
promoted and nourished. Art-like activities exist in
all societies and all walks of life.
If you are to carry one idea away from my talk I
hope it will be this: art is a normal and necessary be-
havior of human beings that like talking, exercising,
playing, working, socializing, learning, loving and
nurturing should be encouraged and developed in
everyone.
Editor’s note: Art Therapy would like to thank the author and the
National Art Education Association for permission to reprint this
article. The article originally appeared in W h t is Art For? Key-
note Addresses of the 1991 NAEA Convention, Karen Lee Carroll
(Ed.), pp. 15-26.