There is no denying the power of art, its ability to further our understanding of the world. But if art enriches our lives it is mainly because it is a fantastic survival system, one that allows us to explore new survival structures and then disseminate them to the entire species through emotional means.
Most humans can creatively think and act, we do it every day without noticing and it’s to our benefit. We make creative connections wether should cross the road by quickly reviewing past patterns of the behaviour of cars, traffic flow, how fast we can run etc. etc. Nature usually gives creatures capacities to enhance the survival within a particular environments. Humans are so flexible mentally, with their creativity, that we can survive over a greater range of environments than most creatures; this is why we have spread out over the surface of the earth, to the depths of oceans and even to the moon. Art obviously involves creativity and some argue that our propensity to create art is just a weird, epiphenomenal, adaptive overkill, a bi-product of having too much creativity for real survival issues and art has arisen out of this mental excess and because we have much spare time on our hands? I suspect this is an oversimplification of this instinct in children and quite a few adults. Stephen Pinker once said that music was cheesecake for the mind, in that it is just extra to the mental meal of life because we have the mental capacities designed for more important things. Hope this helped
Gauguin infused his masterpiece "where do we come from? what are we?
where are we going?" with all of the given themes above except art for
art's sake.
