Human Artistic Behaviour: Adaptation, Byproduct, or Cultural Group Selection?

One morning, when writer Elizabeth Gibson was on her way for coffee as usual, she spotted a conspicuous and colourful canvas in a pile of rubbish. Although she knew nothing of modern art, she felt compelled to take the painting to her crammed Manhattan apartment because, as she put it, “it had a strange power”. The canvas hung for several years in her fl at until she discovered that it was actually the famed work Tres Personajes by the Mexican painter Rufi no Tamayo, stolen some twenty years before. After realizing its value, Gibson returned the picture to its rightful owners. This anecdote illustrates that we have an intuitive concept of art—even without any formal training in aesthetics or art history, we recognize art when we see it. Indeed, experimental studies (e.g., Seifert, 1992) reveal that Western college students without any formal training in art display and freely express aesthetic sensitivities to works of visual art, even if they are unfamiliar with them, like African sculpture. What is it that we see and intuit in works that we denote as ‘art’? This is one of the most outstanding problems in contemporary philosophy of art, and attempting a solution to this problem falls outside the scope of this paper. Objects and perfor-mances that we routinely classify as art share features like skill, strikingness an