Art is one of the distinguishing marks of the soul, as no other animal on our planet has found that need to express the inner mysteries through artistic medium. There are many levels of art, but the characteristic mark of true art lies in its meaning. The coercive methods of those who force paint and paper into the hands of apes and call it art is not the same. The ape may get some paint on the paper, but so would a dog, and so would a rock if the paint were placed strategically. But no ape without the aid of a human has that inner need to express itself artistically. This is because humans are interested in meaning, at least, they used to be. The paintings of human artists "say" something, they mean something, they communicate. The forced mess of ape paintings mean nothing but that humans are trying to get apes to see what we see. But they cannot see it. They can see color, and texture, and even shapes, but not meaning.
Ape paintings (which are actually for sale in some places - I saw one sell for $39,000), look an awful lot like some human Modern Art. I think I will glean some meaning from this.
The evolution of art into its modern expression corresponds quite closely to the evolution of ideas since evolution was proclaimed as the best explanation for anything. Not all modern art is lacking in meaning, but the most extreme cases speak, or should I say, fail to speak, for themselves:
The evolution of art into its modern expression corresponds quite closely to the evolution of ideas since evolution was proclaimed as the best explanation for anything. Not all modern art is lacking in meaning, but the most extreme cases speak, or should I say, fail to speak, for themselves:
Can you guess which one was done by the human, and which by the ape? Despite the fact that they are both just a mess of paint, you can even discover subtle hints of meaning in the second painting. Why did the human fill the whole canvas? These photos are probably copyrighted, but I guarantee you that if the ape painting is copyrighted, it will be a human that contacts me about litigation, and it will be the human that benefits from the settlement.The idea that seems to have sprung forth as a result of Darwin's interpreters, namely that humans are really just smart apes, has also a counterpart: apes are really just dumb humans. This is why we try and get apes to paint, or understand language, etc. And to demonstrate the progress, we show these two paintings and talk ceaselessly about their similarities. See! The apes can paint, just like we can! But in order to help the argument along a little bit, modern art had to adapt its techniques. Artists get rid of all that annoying stuff they learned in art school, or that they learned by looking at a landscape, and they just throw paint anywhere. Now let's compare the two. Ahhh-fascinating! Apes can paint just like we can. In the end, this is really just our worst paintings compared to the ape's forced paintings.
It's not so much that what the ape does with paint and paper isn't fascinating. In some sense, it is. But its the fact that the ape doesn't think of this itself. No ape sits around and thinks, "Well, I guess I might cut the hair off a camel into fine pieces, aggregate and paste those pieces into the tip of a piece of walnut that I'll carve and shape so that it fits perfectly into my hand, and I will call this thing a paintbrush." The fact of human art is a monumental indication of something like a human soul. The fact of ape art is not even factual because it doesn't exist without humans. We are projecting our human soul into apes and the result, really, is not a discovery of an ape soul, but the loss of the human one. You can literally see the loss in modern art.
The response I have to most modern art is, "What does this mean?" And if I cannot find meaning in it, what I interpret it as "saying" is that there is no meaning in life, just abstraction and chance. The paint falls to the canvas by chance, one does not place it there with any intent. This also is the motto of the Darwin interpreters. Its all chance, there is no meaning to the universe. And if I voice the question to the artist, "What does this mean?" often the response is, "What do you think it means." This is also the motto of relativism. There is no one truth to things, its all about what you think it means. Your truth, my truth, etc. Its all relative. But its hard for humans to escape meaning and truth. Even the artist who responds in this way is trying to say something about the world, or how he views it. To him, the universal truth is that there is no universal truth, which is a contradiction. To him, the one thing the world means is that there is no meaning in the world. If there is no meaning in the world, how can it mean that?
The history of art testifies to something much different. Not only is there meaning in the world, not only is there truth, but the meaning and the truth behind it all doesn't just come by chance. What is behind the world, what the universe in all its splendor and beauty testifies to is not something akin to scientific chance, but something like an artist. And the artist, it seems, thought it proper to endow humans with that same artistic sense. For when a great artist creates, he creates meaningfully.
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