Of Art, Play, Love and Fun

In a New York Times article titled "The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start"(login required), we read about the theories of "Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle," who "suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child."

"The tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child," comments the author of the article, Natalie Angier, "look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art."

Dissanayake explains: "These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too... And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme."

Yup, comments the author of this blog post, and yup again. Art, shmart. It's all about fun - fun of the loving kind.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith