What Is Art For? by Ellen Dissanayake offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art, examining art—including visual art, music, poetic language, dance, and performance—from a biobehavioral viewpoint for the first time. Dissanayake argues that art is a biological necessity in human existence and a fundamental characteristic of the human species, examining it alongside play and ritual as behaviors that “make special.” She proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to humans as speech and toolmaking, with arts evolving as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable—essential to human survival. The book integrates human ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology and philosophy of art, anthropology, prehistoric and “primitive” art, Western cultural history, and children’s art.
Why It Matters: Understanding art in its broadest sense as a universal human endowment requires moving beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore four million years of evolutionary history. By demonstrating that every human society displays art and that in most societies the arts play an integral part in social life, Dissanayake reframes art from luxury to necessity—as fundamental to our species as language and tools. The final chapter, exploring how modern Western society has diverged from the societies in which humans evolved, offers a crucial perspective on our aberrant attitudes toward art, suggesting that recovering art’s role in making life special addresses something essential to human flourishing.
