Art as a Claim for Sexual and Social Status
Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist. The aesthetic features of art make sense mainly as displays of the artist’s skill and creativity, not as vehicles of transcendental enlightenment, religious inspiration, social commentary, psycho-analytic revelation, or political revolution. Plato and Hegel derogated art for failing to deliver the same sort of truth that they thought philosophy could produce. They misunderstood the point of art. It is unfair to expect a medium that evolved to display biological fitness to be well adapted for communicating abstract philosophical truths.
This fitness indicator theory helps us to understand why “art” is an honorific term that connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement. When mathematicians talk about the “art” of theorem-proving, they are recognizing that good theorems are often beautiful theorems, and beautiful theorems are often products of minds with high fitness. It is a claim for the social and sexual status of their favorite display medium. Likewise for the “arts” of warfare, chess, football, cooking, gardening, teaching, and sex itself. In each case, art implies that application of skill beyond the pragmatically necessary. Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not art. A claim that one’s work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.
Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature