Why was art created? A journey through history

Ernst Fischer (1899-1971), in his well-known book The Necessity of Art, affirms categorically that “art is necessary”. Perhaps the word necessary is too ostentatious, but, in reality, Can we conceive of any culture in some remote place on earth or in some historical moment that did not make art?

The answer, obviously, is no. All cultures have produced artistic works, whether for religious, aesthetic or simply community cohesion reasons. Art is not only an element linked to social life, but also to the individual, since, in a more Recently, the artistic expression of the subject has been valued as something unique and inherent to his human capacity creator. Why was art created? What need impelled the human being to shape the first artistic object? We'll tell you then.

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Why was art created? A long journey to the origins

The journey that takes us to the beginnings of art is much longer than what we can initially think. Because, in light of recent research, and contrary to what has been believed for decades, Homo Sapiens was not the first living being to make art.

Recently, decorations with geometric motifs have been discovered in the Iberian Peninsula that have been dated to more than 65,000 years old., long before the arrival of Homo Sapiens in Europe. This dating yields evidence that is difficult to deny: Homo Neanderthalensis, our closest relative, was already making art before us.

Why did Neanderthal men and women start painting their caves? We are still far from knowing, since, in many ways, Neanderthal culture is a real mystery. What is clear is that Homo Sapiens, that is, our species, left very old artistic manifestations, linked with his need to express his view of the world, which is probably not too far from the intention of the Neanderthals.

The human being is the only living being that has aesthetic capacity, which necessarily links artistic creation with symbolic thought.. Or, at least, it is what has always been considered. Manuel Martín Loeches (1974), head of Psychobiology at the Complutense University of Madrid, has another theory. In his conference The origin of art from a neuroscientific perspective, the professor assured that artistic creation is directly related to a factor chemical: when faced with color and perspective, the brain generates a sensation of joy that makes it secrete endogenous opiates that favor the sensation of pleasure and welfare.

In other words, Martín Loeches affirms that the origin of creation is not linked to symbolic elements such as language or religion, but to something as simple as brain chemistry. This would make more explicit the need of Neanderthals to capture colored pigments on the walls of their caves. The affirmation supposes a revolution in the sense that, until now, the origin of creation was supported artistic in a symbolic mind as a sine qua non condition for the artistic phenomenon to occur.

This could explain, for example, why Neanderthals were able to express themselves artistically through chromatic pigmentation, even though, supposedly, they could not think of symbolic form. But then, if according to Professor Martín Loeches a symbolic mind is not necessary to express oneself artistically, Why is the human being the only creature that has been capable of making art? Or rather: is it?

more than chemistry

Despite the evidence on the reaction of our brain to chromatic stimuli (which would also be, by the way, in a spring landscape) it is necessary that there are other factors that convert art into an exclusively human. These elements are aspects such as the need for communication in the group and the expression of concepts of a religious or symbolic nature.. According to Vicenç Furió Galí, author of History of art: theoretical and methodological aspects, aesthetics is the function that is furthest from of the practical, for which reason, obviously, at the origin of artistic creation there must be something more than a need primary.

This is perhaps what differentiates human creations from those of the great primates. In the 1960s, zoologist Desmond Morris revolutionized the art scene by presenting "works of art” of chimpanzees, which raised the question: is it really the human being the only one who can do art? Morris taught several chimpanzees to paint. At first, the animals responded satisfactorily and seemed to be concentrating on their work with the paints. However, Morris soon realized that if they were stopped "rewarding" with food, the chimpanzees lost interest in life. activity, which differentiates these primates from a human child, who can spend the whole afternoon drawing for the simple fact of draw.

The second step in Morris's experiment did come with an unexpected twist, as Congo, the chimpanzee he taught to paint at the age of two, performed his work without any compensation. It's more, Congo's brushstrokes were not made randomly, but seemed subject to some kind of chromatic or aesthetic logic. The case was so notorious that Picasso and Miró themselves had paintings from the Congo in their collection.

The question is, then, inevitable: was the origin of art exclusively related to aesthetic pleasure, and did it later become a vehicle for the expression of ideas? Morris's experiment seems to reinforce this hypothesis, since Congo did not make “art” as a simple “compensatory” activity, but for pure creative pleasure.

After a first aesthetic experience that, as Martín Loeches maintains, could be linked to brain chemistry, the human being soon realized that, through art, he could express his concerns about life and his surroundings, in a kind of exorcism spiritual. He realized that he could immortalize the "soul" of his deceased in votive statuettes, or capture his face in wax masks or busts; that is, to capture the infinite in something tangible, which went far beyond pure aesthetic pleasure. Art became, in this way, a spiritual necessity.