That clever one Brian Eno after his speech handing out the Turner Prize (take note this was against his wishes) responded to a journalist: "Why do we evolve culture? Why are we so interested in style? What does it do for us?" Indeed we could add.. 'Why do we bother?'..
I have just read a book. The Artful Universe Expanded, by John D. Barrow. Even if one is brought up in an artistic rather than scientific education may find its treatment of aesthetic pleasure a touch underdeveloped, the book is fascinating. To paraphrase directly (ie. copy) from Amazon: "It draws out the deep links between our aesthetic inclinations - our art, our music, our appreciation of form, pattern, and landscape - and the mathematical and physical structure of the Universe of which we form a part. Barrow challenges the commonly held view that our sense of beauty is entirely free and unfettered. He argues that as beings that have evolved in this Universe, we are products of its natural laws and its underlying mathematical forms. Our minds show the imprints of this structure, which constrains and moulds our perceptions and our aesthetic preferences. In this rich and wide-ranging exploration, Barrow looks at the evolution of complexity, form in painting, computer art and music, and how landscapes and the wheeling patterns of stars in the night sky have impinged upon the human psyche. "
What I understood from it's pages, is taken up with an explanation of the way that we are creatures of our universe, our perceptions moulded by its physics....we are merely stardust creating a form.
In essence we have been made in it's image. In Muin we state that our image is yours. Because I believe this to be so..
If Culture is simply a happy accident. Is it more an unhappy one? Barely dead nor alive...one that is expanding, fragmenting into a black hole of style. We are increasingly attached to this notion, so embedded to the idea that art is an inalienable part of humanity, we find it hard to imagine that it might be in fact an unwanted aftermath of something other, that it might actually be hostile to physical human survival and more of use to the ethereal. But how could we possibly tell what creatures we might have been without this notion of art we inhabit?
I don't believe for one single moment that Art has or does holds us back as a species , though I suspect that Art's evolutionary value must operate at some higher level away from this Earth.
Yet that clever one again Brian Eno offers a more insightful suggestion when he wrote that "to co-operate you have to be able to imagine what it would be like to hold another picture of the world... I can imagine culture being a kind of simulator, an empathy lab, a way of trying things out with only symbolic risks attacked." Does this culture of ours then, offer us pleasure and thought because it delivers the reciprocation for intuitive risk and exploration while protecting us from their deathly consequences. It is easy to see how this might offer considerable evolutionary advantage to artistic humans.
c/o The Independant of Muin. 95
