by Robin Hanson
ART IN HUMANS
Now, there are intriguing parallels between bowerbird behavior and human art. But it’s also important to mention some of the key differences.
Crucially, in our species, males don’t have a monopoly on making art—nor do females have a monopoly on enjoying it. Both sexes are avid artists, and both are art aficionados. Insofar as we use art for courtship, then, it goes both ways: men impressing women with their art and vice versa.24 This makes perfect sense for a species, like ours, in which even males invest a lot in their offspring and, consequently, need to be choosy about their mates.
But the bigger difference is that human art is more than just a courtship display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s value as a potential mate. It also functions as a general-purpose fitness display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness.25 Fitness displays can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals.26 And humans use art for all of these things. In One Thousand and One Nights, for example, Scheherazade uses her artful storytelling to stave off execution and win the affections of the king. Maya Angelou, in contrast, managed not to woo Bill Clinton with her poetry, but rather to impress him—so much so that he invited her to perform at his presidential inauguration in 1993. Intimidating rivals is perhaps a lesser function of human art, but even here, we find examples in graffiti (as when gangs tag walls to mark their territory) as well as in stand-up comedy (as when comedians use wit to humiliate hecklers). The point is simply that art is an impressive display, and humans have many reasons for wanting to impress others.
Importantly, human artists don’t need to be conscious of this motive.27 Humans, as we’ve seen many times throughout the book, are adept at acting on unconscious motives, especially when the motive in question (e.g., showing off) is antisocial and norm-violating. What’s important isn’t whether we’re aware that we’re using art as a fitness display, but rather the fact that art works as a fitness display. It serves a useful and important purpose, both to artists and consumers, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves endowed with instincts both to make and enjoy art.
There’s a lot of conventional wisdom, not to mention a long philosophical literature, about what art is and what it should be. In some accounts, it’s primarily about portraying beauty and inducing pleasure. In others, it’s about self-expression or communicating with an audience—conveying ideas, emotions, and experiences that the consumer wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Art should challenge us, push the envelope, and strive to effect political change. These functions aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they incompatible with the fitness display theory. There’s no doubt that observing art often induces strong feelings that we deeply crave, such as awe and an appreciation of beauty, and that creating art often gives us a strong sense of accomplishment and connection.
The argument we’re making in this chapter is simply that “showing off” is one of the important motives we have for making art, and that many details of our artistic instincts have been shaped substantially by this motive. Not only do artists want to show off, but consumers simultaneously use art as a means to judge the artist. That’s one of the big reasons people appreciate art, and we can’t understand the full range of phenomena unless we’re willing to look at art as a fitness display.
Remember, we need to explain how artists and consumers get concrete advantages out of making and enjoying art, especially given how much effort it takes and how much attention we pay to it. Art is an animal behavior, after all, and we need something like the fitness-display theory to explain how art pays for itself in terms of enhanced survival and reproduction, especially in the primitive (“folk art”) context of our foraging ancestors.
To better understand the phenomena that make sense only according to the fitness display theory, it helps to introduce an important distinction between the “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” properties of a work of art:
•Intrinsic properties are the qualities that reside “in” the artwork itself, those that a consumer can directly perceive when experiencing a work of art. We might also think of them as perceptual properties. The intrinsic or perceptual properties of a painting, for example, include everything visible on the canvas: the colors, textures, brush strokes, and so forth.28
•Extrinsic properties, in contrast, are factors that reside outside of the artwork, those that the consumer can’t perceive directly from the art itself. These properties include who the artist is, which techniques were used, how many hours it took, how “original” it is, how expensive the materials were, and so on. When observing a painting, for example, consumers might care about whether the artist copied the painting from a photograph. This is an extrinsic property insofar as it doesn’t influence our perceptual experience of the painting.
Now we’re ready to understand the most important difference between the conventional view of art (in any of its forms: beauty, communication, etc.) and the fitness-display theory. The difference is that the conventional view locates the vast majority of art’s value in its intrinsic properties, along with the experiences that result from perceiving and contemplating those properties. Beauty, for example, is typically understood as an experience that arises from the artwork itself. According to the conventional view, artists use their technical skills and expressive power to create the final physical product, which is then perceived and enjoyed by the consumer. The extrinsic properties, meanwhile, are mostly an aside or an afterthought; in the conventional view, they aren’t crucial to the transaction.
In contrast, in the fitness-display theory, extrinsic properties are crucial to our experience of art. As a fitness display, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity. And here it’s often the extrinsic properties that make the difference between art that’s impressive, and which therefore succeeds for both artist and consumer, and art that falls flat. If a work of art is physically (intrinsically) beautiful, but was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a similar work that required greater skill to produce. One study, for example, found that consumers appreciate the same artwork less when they’re told it was made by multiple artists instead of a single artist—because they’re assessing the work by how much effort went into it, rather than simply by the final result.29
The importance of extrinsic properties becomes especially clear when we contemplate the idea of a hypothetical “replica museum”—a gallery stocked entirely with copies of the world’s masterpieces. If the replicas are sufficiently accurate, they will be indistinguishable from the originals. Maybe artists and art students would care more about seeing the originals, but the rest of us should (according to the conventional view) be perfectly happy to visit a replica museum. Because replicas are cheap relative to the originals, we’ll pay less to see a much wider variety—and in the convenience of our hometowns, rather than scattered around the world in Paris, London, Venice, and New York. Of course, replica museums don’t exist, and the idea strikes us as a bit silly30—but that’s precisely the point. Our disdain for replicas strongly suggests that we often use art as something other than a trigger for sensory or intellectual experiences.
Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, celebrated for its beautiful detail, the surreal backdrop, and of course the subject’s enigmatic smile. More visitors have seen the Mona Lisa in person—on display behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre—than any other painting on the planet. But when researchers Jesse Prinz and Angelika Seidel asked subjects to consider a hypothetical scenario in which the Mona Lisa burned to a crisp, 80 percent of them said they’d prefer to see the ashes of the original rather than an indistinguishable replica.31 This should give us pause.
THE IMPORTANCE OF EXTRINSIC PROPERTIES
Imagine that one of your friends, an artist, invites you over to see her latest piece. “It�
�s a sculpture of sorts,” she says. “Smooth swirls punctuated by sharp spikes. Rich pinks and oranges. Pretty abstract, but I think you’ll like it.” It sounds interesting, so you drop by her workshop, and there, perched on a pedestal in the center of the room, is the sculpture. It’s a delicate seashell-looking thing, and your friend is right, it’s beautiful. But as you move in for a closer look, you begin to wonder if it might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” Here your perceptual experience is fixed; whatever its provenance, the thing on the pedestal is clearly pleasing to the eye. But its value as art hinges entirely on the artist’s technique. If she found it on the beach: meh. If she used a 3D printer: cool. And if she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!
This way of approaching art—of looking beyond the object’s intrinsic properties in order to evaluate the effort and skill of the artist—is endemic to our experience of art. In everything that we treat as a work of “art,” we care about more than the perceptual experience it affords. In particular, we care about how it was constructed and what its construction says about the virtuosity of the artist.
Consider our emphasis on originality in works of art. We prize originality and spurn works that are too derivative, however pleasing they might otherwise be to our senses or intellect. Here again, we betray our concern for using art to evaluate the artist. Insofar as art is a perceptual experience, it shouldn’t matter whether the artist copied another artist in producing the work, but it makes a world of difference in gauging the artist’s skill, effort, and creativity.
“We find attractive,” says Miller, “those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand–eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time.”32
Artists, in turn, often respond to this incentive by using techniques that are more difficult or demanding, but which don’t improve the intrinsic properties of the final product. “From an evolutionary point of view,” writes Miller, “the fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive.”33 Artists routinely sacrifice expressive power and manufacturing precision in order to make something more “impressive” as a fitness display.
One place we find this sacrifice is in the performing arts. For example, by almost any measure of technical control, film exceeds live theater. Film directors can fuss endlessly over lighting, set design, and camera angles; they can demand retake after retake until their actors get everything just right. The camera can zoom in to capture movement and facial expressions of great subtlety. Mistakes can often be fixed by editors in post-production. And the results are frequently sublime, which is one reason film has become the most popular dramatic and comedic medium of our time. And yet consumers continue to relish live performances, shelling out even for back-row seats at many times the price of a movie ticket. Why? In part, because performing live is a handicap. With such little margin for error, the results are that much more impressive. A similar trade-off arises for musicians (e.g., lip synching is anathema) and standup comics, and for improv versus sketch-comedy troupes. A live performance, or even more so an improvised one, won’t be as technically perfect as a prerecorded one, but it succeeds by putting the artists’ talents on full display.
Consider another application of the handicap principle: the appeal of constraints in a given art form. Poets who adhere to strict meter and rhyme schemes prevent themselves from using words that don’t fit. Sculptors who work with marble don’t allow themselves to patch up their mistakes with putty or glue. And consumers appreciate it. We enjoy art not in spite of the constraints that artists hold themselves to, but because those constraints allow their talents to shine.
WHEN EXTRINSIC FACTORS CHANGE
We can also catch art being used as a fitness display by observing “natural experiments”: historical scenarios in which the extrinsic (production) factors change, while everything else remains more or less the same. In the conventional view of why we appreciate art (beauty, etc.), it’s only the intrinsic properties that matter. If we leave the intrinsic factors the same, then, we shouldn’t expect our appreciation to change much, even if the extrinsic factors change. But in fact, our experiences change dramatically.
Consider the lobster—as David Foster Wallace invites us to do in an essay of the same name. “Up until sometime in the 1800s,” writes Wallace,
lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England. “Unbelievable abundance” is how one source describes the situation.34
Today, of course, lobster is far less plentiful and much more expensive, and now it’s considered a delicacy, “only a step or two down from caviar.”
A similar aesthetic shift occurred with skin color in Europe. When most people worked outdoors, suntanned skin was disdained as the mark of a low-status laborer. Light skin, in contrast, was prized as a mark of wealth; only the rich could afford to protect their skin by remaining indoors or else carrying parasols. Later, when jobs migrated to factories and offices, lighter skin became common and vulgar, and only the wealthy could afford to lay around soaking in the sun.35
Now, lobster and suntans may not be “art,” exactly, but we nevertheless experience them aesthetically, and they illustrate how profoundly our tastes can change in response to changes in extrinsic factors. Here, things that were once cheap and easy became precious and difficult, and therefore more valued. Typically, however, the extrinsic factors change in ways that make things easier rather than more difficult.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most items were made by hand, consumers unequivocally valued technical perfection in their art objects. Paintings and sculptures, for example, were prized for their realism, that is, how accurately they depicted their subject matter. Realism did two things for the viewer: it provided a rare and enjoyable sensory experience (intrinsic properties), and it demonstrated the artist’s virtuosity (extrinsic properties). There was no conflict between these two agendas. This was true across a variety of art forms and (especially) crafts. Symmetry, smooth lines and surfaces, the perfect repetition of geometrical forms—these were the marks of a skilled artisan, and they were valued as such.36
Then, starting in the mid-18th century, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a new suite of manufacturing techniques. Objects that had previously been made only by hand—a process intensive in both labor and skill—could now be made with the help of machines. This gave artists and artisans unprecedented control over the manufacturing process. Walter Benjamin, a German cultural critic writing in the 1920s and 1930s, called this the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and it led to an upheaval in aesthetic sensibilities.37 No longer was intrinsic perfection prized for its own sake. A vase, for example, could now be made smoother and more symmetric than ever before—but that very perfection became the mark of cheap, mass-produced goods. In response, those consumers who could afford handmade goods learned to prefer them, not only in spite of, but because of their imperfections.
In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen invites us to consider the case of two spoons: an expensive, handmade silver spoon and a factory-made spoon cast from cheap aluminum.38 As utensils, the two spoons are equally serviceable; both convey food to the mouth, no problem. And yet consumers vastly prefer the silver spoon to the aluminum spoon. Is it because silver is more beautiful than aluminum? Many consumers would say so. But
imagine showing the spoons to an untrained forager from the Amazonian forests, someone who knows nothing of modern manufacturing or the scarcity of different metals. Both spoons, being polished and shiny, will catch and please the forager’s eye; the slight differences in grain and color won’t matter much. The silver spoon may be heavier, but the forager may just as well prefer the lighter spoon. Perhaps the most salient difference will be the fact that the aluminum spoon is made to a more exacting standard, with nary an imperfection on its surface, whereas the silver spoon will have minor defects from the silversmith’s hammer. After attending to all the perceptual qualities of the two spoons, the forager might easily prefer the aluminum one.
What’s “missing” from the forager’s experience is nowhere to be found in the spoons themselves, as physical objects. The key facts, so relevant to modern consumers, are entirely extrinsic to the spoons. We know that aluminum is common and cheap, while silver is rare and precious. And we know that factory-made goods are available to everyone, while only the wealthy can afford one-of-a-kind goods handcrafted by loving artisans. Once these key facts are known, savvy consumers—those with refinement and taste—quickly learn to value everything about the silver spoon that differentiates it from its more vulgar counterpart, imperfections and all.
The advent of photography wreaked similar havoc on the realist aesthetic in painting. Painters could no longer hope to impress viewers by depicting scenes as accurately as possible, as they had strived to do for millennia. “In response,” writes Miller, “painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself.”39