Art and biology
Howard Brazee
it.
Biology says I should like what increases the chance of my children's survival.
So I find women look good. This works when I appreciate big enough hips to
bear children, but doesn't work when I like breasts that are bigger than
necessary for their primary task. Many species have had their sexual
characteristics too pronounced for survival.
I suppose I could find a desert or even the stars attractive, bringing me to be
a nomad and having me pay better attention to my surroundings. Great
paintings, literature, or even poetry can help me discover more stuff that is
useful.
Rounded edges are attractive (and generally safe).
But I am not getting a handle on why I like Beethoven's 9th.
How alien would alien art be?
Joshua P. Hill
wrote:
>Looking at art, I wonder how much of what I like is biology. Possibly all of
>it.
>
>Biology says I should like what increases the chance of my children's survival.
> So I find women look good. This works when I appreciate big enough hips to
>bear children, but doesn't work when I like breasts that are bigger than
>necessary for their primary task. Many species have had their sexual
>characteristics too pronounced for survival.
One possible explanation of that is that large breasts are a plumage
display, that is, that they display a woman's fat reserves. It has
also been suggested that the breasts help keep the child warm.
>I suppose I could find a desert or even the stars attractive, bringing me to be
>a nomad and having me pay better attention to my surroundings. Great
>paintings, literature, or even poetry can help me discover more stuff that is
>useful.
>
>Rounded edges are attractive (and generally safe).
>
>But I am not getting a handle on why I like Beethoven's 9th.
>
>How alien would alien art be?
Alien, but not unrecognizable, I think. Take music. An alien's hearing
might be centered around a different frequency range, particularly if
the atmosphere of the alien planet had a different density than the
atmosphere of earth. Many earth animals already have calls and hearing
above or below the human range. But assuming that the ranges overlap
sufficiently, scales are surprisingly similar throughout the world,
because the choices are largely constrained by math, e.g., by harmonic
relationships and the overtones of the instruments being played. They
might use something like quarter tones or, if their ears are better at
discerning frequency than ours, even smaller steps, but as long as the
ear could pick it up it wouldn't be terribly unfamiliar. So too for
other elements of music. The scales would be different, various
conventions would be different, but the symmetry puzzles that underlie
the conceptual aspects of music would come from the same mathematical
stock; the imitative elements would likely have similarities as well
as differences (forex, they would probably have thunderstorms so a
drum roll would produce a similar emotional effect, but if their
flying creatures didn't chirp a piccolo wouldn't have the same
emotional effect for them -- bird song calms us down, because birds
stop chirping when they sense a threat, and it seems we're
instinctively attuned to that).
Josh
Jeff Suzuki
> Looking at art, I wonder how much of what I like is biology. Possibly all of
> it.
> ...
> How alien would alien art be?
Probably less alien than you'd think. There would be physical limitations:
Intelligent dogs might make "smellscapes", and races that "see" by sonar will not
produce paintings (cf. Niven's Kdatlyno). Sculpture would probably be universal,
though.
But..."All your base are belong to us" is idiomatic English compared to, say, James
Joyce, and I can't imagine that alien art would be any more alien than, say,
Jackson Pollock's blotches or Mondrian's squares.
Jeffs
Mark Fergerson
> Looking at art, I wonder how much of what I like is biology. Possibly all of
> it.
This smells like a great insight.
> Biology says I should like what increases the chance of my children's survival.
> So I find women look good. This works when I appreciate big enough hips to
> bear children, but doesn't work when I like breasts that are bigger than
> necessary for their primary task. Many species have had their sexual
> characteristics too pronounced for survival.
The "erotic" component of art is well recognized, and the
balance between anatomic accuracy and prurience has
obviously been the focus of many an argument. Is
Michelangelo's "David" prurient? Is a Western movie back-bar
reclining nude "art"?
It doesn't help that artistes and psychologists use
incompatible jargons to express the emotions evoked by a
given image.
Our "erotic" perceptions are colored by our social habits
and our biology; various human cultures give different
acceptibility weights to monogamy, polygamy and polyandry.
Hence it may be "art" here, but "smut" across the border.
What would a member of a hive species consider erotic as
opposed to prurient? How about a species that reproduces by
budding?
> I suppose I could find a desert or even the stars attractive, bringing me to be
> a nomad and having me pay better attention to my surroundings. Great
> paintings, literature, or even poetry can help me discover more stuff that is
> useful.
Those sparse, flat-topped African desert trees seem to
express the essence of "treeness" to what I consider a
surprisingly large cross-section of humans, more so than say
sequoias or monkey-puzzles. Almost everyone stares at them
longer than at other trees, and say very nice things about
them. Some say that since we're all Africans by heritage, we
all see them as refuges from lions or something like that.
That suggests that alien art will be driven by their
evolutionary history as well.
> Rounded edges are attractive (and generally safe).
Not all art is intended to evoke "peacefulness". Why else
would repeating jagged graphic patterns be so universal?
Niven's Puppeteers would likely find such patterns
unnerving, maybe without knowing why.
> But I am not getting a handle on why I like Beethoven's 9th.
Lots of possibilities. Repetition is essential to music,
elaboration of a theme, "completion" of a theme to provide a
kind of satisfaction, and so on. All these elements are
driven by time-bound thinking.
> How alien would alien art be?
AIUI we perceive time at a particular rate based largely
on events in our environment and how they synch with our
biochemistry, so alien music will, as J. Hill points out, be
based on what's in an alien's environment and how the alien
perceives that environment. Without going walkabout on an
alien world, we might never "get" their art or music, and
maybe not even recognize it as art at all.
I can see an exhibition of alien art in a gallery on
Earth. You'd have to wear sensory distorting goggles,
headphones, whatever, to experience the art "properly". Even
at that you'd need to study their environment, biology,
social structure(s) and like that to be considered a dabbler
much less an expert.
I also see parallels in "non-artistic" endeavors like
architecture and city planning. If you wanted to gain an
advantage in diplomatic discussions, you'd furnish and
decorate conference rooms in a style that emphasized
discomfort-evoking elements if you understood the other
guy's artistic perceptions better than he (it) did.
Mark L. Fergerson
Pekka P. Pirinen
wrote:
> Howard Brazee wrote:
> > Looking at art, I wonder how much of what I like is biology. Possibly all of
> > it.
I'm not sure what you're setting up as the counterpart of biology here.
Culture? I rather suspect myself that cultural preferences are almost
entirely rationalizations of natural patterns of human group behaviour,
much as individual decisions are rationalizations of largely
subconscious judgement and character. But such rationalizations do have
a way of taking on a life of their own through the agency of language,
so perhaps it is a useful distinction to use esthetics.
> > Biology says I should like what increases the chance of my children's survival.
> > So I find women look good. [...]
>
> The "erotic" component of art is well recognized, and the
> balance between anatomic accuracy and prurience has
> obviously been the focus of many an argument. Is
> Michelangelo's "David" prurient?
Many largely pointless arguments: Since "art" serves as label of
prestige within the society, one is mostly arguing about the sexual
mores in our society. Whereas questions of "what I like" sound the
depths of the soul.
> Hence it may be "art" here, but "smut" across the border.
Quite. Or "art" now, "smut" yesterday or tomorrow.
> That suggests that alien art [...]
So the interesting speculation is not alien art, but alien entertainment
and alien decoration.
> > But I am not getting a handle on why I like Beethoven's 9th.
>
> Lots of possibilities. Repetition is essential to music,
> elaboration of a theme, "completion" of a theme to provide a
> kind of satisfaction, and so on. All these elements are
> driven by time-bound thinking.
I suspect there is a more intimate connection between our neural
machinery and music. Musical sounds are, after all, mostly rather
unnatural, but for some reason we find them pleasant and fascinating.
Music can capture your attention in a way that doesn't seem likely to
have survival value. Some strange resonance in the brainwaves or
crosstalk between the auditory and other brain functions must contribute
to this.
If that's the case, aliens will not understand our music nor have any of
their own. Rhythms are, however, a basic category of perception, so it
seems likely that aliens can understand them, and might even have
rhythmic entertainments of some sort, maybe even auditory.
Nevertheless, modes, themes and structures are conscious elaborations
upon the basic musical ability, arising by cultural development. Aliens
might well appreciate them, as an abstract art.
--
Pekka P. Pirinen
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
Ilmari Karonen
[snip]
>Joyce, and I can't imagine that alien art would be any more alien than, say,
>Jackson Pollock's blotches or Mondrian's squares.
To a first approximation, Mondrian's squares are about pure layout
without any distracting content. It's quite likely that aliens might
have similar art, or at least be able to appreciate it as an interesting
perceptual exercise even if they lack our emotional associations to it.
What I'd wonder about is if aliens would find our abstract art awfully
dull or awfully confusing. Maybe they like squares and regular grids,
and find the golden ratio skewed and unbalanced. Or perhaps they have a
preference for triangles and hexagons, and consider any layout based on
rectangles to be ugly and monotonous. Or...
Going off on a tangent, it occurs to me that one might perhaps postulate
aliens that have enormous difficulty reading most human writing systems
because their eyes can't skip from the end of one line to the beginning
of the next without losing track of which line is which. Or conversely,
alien writing systems that are equally impossible for humans.
--
Ilmari Karonen
Andrew Melka
Hypothesis: the square or rectangle is the primordial symbol used
by humans to signify 'human'. Basically this is because of the rarity
of squares and rectangles in nature (e.g. only some crystals maybe) on
the one hand. On the other hand, four-fold symettry appears almost
immediately in human products such as hand axes and animal pelts for
clothing. With the invention of the plow, and the multiplication table
math of land ownership, squares and rectangles got a big boost as
symbols. Maybe some of the better known four-fold symbols: crosses,
mandalas, swastikas, date only from agricultural times. But it is
exactly the unnaturalness and uncommonness of four-sided representations
that would have made it a symbol for 'human' from earliest times.
This insight has to a large extent now been lost in our
artificially constructed environments. For example, the plate enclosed
in the mariner (?) space probe depicted a male human with one arm raised
Leonardo fashion. The aliens who might find it will probably
immeadiately be struck by the orthogonal relationship of the limb to the
body on the one hand, and the rectangular shape of the plate itself on
the other. But just as significant will be the absence of any
decorative border calling attention to the four-sidedness of the plate.
Obviously these earthlings no longer see any specialness to their
unnatural and 'human' artifacts. Conclusion: garbage planet.
Joshua P. Hill
I think they'll probably be more curious about why we're two
dimensional.
Josh
Jeff Suzuki
> What I'd wonder about is if aliens would find our abstract art awfully
> dull or awfully confusing. Maybe they like squares and regular grids,
> and find the golden ratio skewed and unbalanced.
You raise an interesting question. The golden ratio seems to be embedded in the
structure of natural objects, and one theory why it seems so "pleasing" is that
on a subconscious level, we associate it with the natural world. Based on this,
it would follow that alien cultures would also see the golden ratio as pleasing,
and we'd see phi showing up in their art.
Hmmm, here's a free idea for a SF story: you can tell how a lot about a culture
is by what it considers to be aesthetically pleasing. Cf. Huxley's "Brave New
World", where children are taught that Nature Is Bad, hence things like the
golden ratio, which are evocative of nature, are removed from art. I'm not sure
where the story would go from there, but...
Jeffs