Abstract

Art is a nonutilitarian activity that may nevertheless help us identify or characterize constants or essentials in a changing world. Its boundaries with "pleasing" natural objects or utilitarian human artifacts are not always clear, but a gratifying engagement of the normal perceptual processes may be a significant feature. The visual artist deliberately or unconsciously seems to select channels of information processing only recently identified by the visual scientist. While the evolutionarily-adaptive pressures are unclear, possible precursors to "artistic behavior" are seen in the higher primates. The archaeological record reveals appealing and immediately recognizable art forms in the galleries of Ice-Age Europe of 30,000 years ago. Before then the record is sparser, but items of decoration, ochre crayons, scratched markings, objets trouvés and manuports of interesting pebbles, crystals and fossils provide a possible window into early minds. The beginnings of art may lie in nonrepresentational dots, lines, curves, intersections and contours, but we may have little reason to appeal to corresponding hallucinatory or "entoptic phosphenes" of shamanistic activity. Although links with communicatory behavior in other species may be apparent in music, art may either have proved adaptive under conditions of runaway sexual selection, or may even be of no evolutionary or functional significance whatsoever.

Terms, meanings and directions

The visual arts were highly valued in ancient Greece and Rome, and their appreciation was considered a mark of culture. The amousos (uncultured) individual simply was not tetragonos ("four-square", or as we would nowadays say "well-rounded"). However the etymological derivation of "aesthetics", aisthetikos, signifies "perceptive" or even "perceptible" in Greek, with aisthesis simply meaning "perception". We shall in fact shortly address the recently described links between perceptual processes in the brain, and aesthetic experience. The derivation of "art" comes from the Latin ars, which means something like "skill in working", and, curiously, equates with scientia or "knowledge", though nowadays the two ideas, art and science, are often contrasted. Indeed the Greek techne, originally signifying "production", seems to capture both of the above senses of ars and scientia. To the Greeks, the object of art and aesthetics was simply to kalon or to kallos, "the beautiful"; they would not have appreciated recent exploratory assays at deliberately provoking negative emotions with the grotesque or frightening.

In this paper I shall ask whether art, that apparently quintessentially human activity, is indeed unique to our species, or whether its precursors may be discerned amidst the relict artifacts of our hominid ancestors, or even in the "works" of other primates. I shall ask what we mean by art, what are its limits, and whether its practice and products correspond in some necessary way to the mechanisms and workings of the perceptual system, whether normal or disordered. Why do we "do" art, and is it in some way complementary or alternative to language and other forms of communication? What, if any, are the possibly-adaptive evolutionary aspects of art, and are they perhaps more prominent and relevant in music, than in the visual or plastic arts? Conversely, is art perhaps of no evolutionary or adaptive significance whatsoever, and merely a by product of an advanced, disengaged brain?

Reductionism and the "function" of art.

A scientific analysis of art and aesthetics is necessarily in part reductionist, and may be abhorrent to practitioners or cultivators of the arts; thus Wheelwell (2000) inveighs with undisguised bitterness against "….sexist scientific and reductive megalomania …. Without [scientists] being in the least conscious of their ignorance of vast areas that lie outside science in the narrower sense, or of the dangers and malignant consequences of this ignorance" (p. 42). Nevertheless art, like language, is a quintessentially human attribute and activity, and unlike language, tool use and other practical human activities, it seems essentially nonutilitarian, an activity to be undertaken when we have "time out" from meeting the needs of survival.
So what exactly do we mean by art? Hodgson (2000), an archaeologist, sees it as an attempt (in the visual mode) to render permanent and tangible that which is formally intangible and fleeting - the seeking of order, the expression of a sense of pattern, harmony and even symmetry amid a chaotic world of confusion. Zeki (1999), a neuroscientist, similarly sees that the function of art is to search for the constant, lasting essential or enduring features of objects, surfaces, faces or situations, and to acquire thereby a deeper knowledge of them. Art, therefore, is both selective and generalizing, involving search for constances. Can we then present a natural object (an objet trouvé like a beautifully preserved fossil or a mineral crystal) as a work of art, or a photographed landscape, or even (and see Goguen, 2000) Duchamp's urinal in all its pleasing technical perfection as an artifact, and thus submitted to the 1917 New York Exhibition? We shall, after all, shortly discuss the role of such objets trouvés in the Paleolithic Acheulian and Mousterian cultures as possible precursors of an aesthetic sensibility. However Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999), while recognizing art as a celebration of human individuality, nevertheless note that its "purpose" is not merely to depict or represent reality - which can be done easily enough with a camera - but to enhance, transcend or even distort or caricaturize reality, so as to emphasize or exaggerate what the artist sees as the key, salient or canonical aspects. They note that artists, consciously or unconsciously, deploy certain rules or principles to activate certain brain regions or mechanisms, via grouping, contrast, closure, symmetry etc., to help in the viewer's problem-solving process; such acts of discovery in the viewer, by invoking requisite perceptual processes, are intrinsically gratifying, just as in solving a puzzle. Mangan (1999) agrees that "successful" art thereby intensifies the emotional, perceptual and cognitive experiences that otherwise occur in many non-aesthetic contexts, but also observes that while moderate variations from an expected or habitual experience may be rewarding, extreme variations are typically adversive. Similarly, Martindale (1999) observes that where a mild exaggeration or caricaturization of the features of "beautiful" faces may further enhance their appeal, the averaging of the features of quite ordinary faces has the same effect.

Art and the "rules" of perceptual processing

Zeki (1999) takes further the idea (above) that rules govern our perception of objects from contours, colors, planes etc., and that these rules are exploited, perhaps unconsciously, by the artist. Thus he notes that visual perception is modular, involving a set of parallel systems operating within a temporal hierarchy; color is seen before form, which is seen before motion. Modularity, and the grouping of cells performing such related functions, may permit the brain to discount different kinds of information, while acquiring knowledge about different attributes. Moreover, there may be a similar modularity or functional specialization in visual aesthetics. If area V4 (in the prestriate visual cortex) is damaged, we cannot see the world in color; if area V5 (lying more anteriorly to the V4 complex) is affected, our ability to perceive objects in motion is compromised; another closely adjacent area (the fusiform gyrus) mediates our ability to recognize familiar faces. (Note that according to Zeki, 1993, the exact anatomical and architectonic locations and boundaries of these regions in humans is still a matter of dispute.) The perception of form and the awareness of meaning may similarly be differentially lost or preserved. An artist is, perhaps, a neurologist manqué (unrealized in ambition), or malgré lui (despite himself). Thus the visual brain and the artist may strive for the same goals, with the latter seeking to exploit the characteristics of the brain's parallel processing systems, often even restricting himself or herself to a single system. In this way we can be helped to see things "as they really are" - again, constancy, in an ever-changing world. Zeki (1999) argues that aesthetics, like all human activities, must obey the rules of the brain, of whose activity it is a product, and any theory of aesthetics must take account of the workings of the brain.

Brown (1999), a neurologist, takes an essentially similar position: art is distinguished from ordinary perception by the intensity of the conceptual feelings evoked by the artist in the viewer. Content alone cannot distinguish an artifact (urinal, or objet trouvé) from a work of art. Art is like an externalization of an artist's consciousness (a window into his or her mind?), allowing us access to the artist's way of seeing, not merely what he or she happened to see. It is, however, interesting to note that recent brain-imaging studies (Kreiman, Koch & Fried, 2000) indicate that the same regions are active during imagery as during perception. Why however are we not all equally good as artists at representing, physically, the contents of such images? Miller et al. (1998) report the release or facilitation of artistic creativity in the setting of dementia. Five patients, suffering from frontotemporal dementia which devastated their language and social skills, revealed unexpected and previously undemonstrated artistic talent, presumably by some form of inhibitory release. Maybe we all do possess untapped potential.

Art, the savant, and symbolism

As Kapur (1996) notes, the results of a brain lesion are not just loss of function in a particular topographical or cognitive area, but often also disinhibitory processes, along with efforts from the rest of the brain to re-establish its maximal potential. Similar functional facilitation may account for the savant syndrome, where there is abnormally preserved competence or even outstanding abilities in the general context of fairly profound intellectual deficit; this phenomenon is more common in males and is often associated with autism and obsessive compulsive disorder. Although obsessive rehearsal and practice may explain some of the findings, Pesanti et al. (2001) studied a calculating prodigy under PET imaging; they found that he employed different brain areas to those employed by people undertaking normal calculations.

A classic instance of savant processes in the context of art is provided by Selfe (1977); Nadia, an autistic girl, had little language and severe learning disabilities, in the presence of an amazing and apparently innate capacity at the age of 3 to 4 to draw horses, other animals, and, latterly, humans. When with special training she acquired language by the age of 9 years, she lost her extraordinary drawing talents, almost as if they occurred at the expense of language, as an alternative medium of communication. The idea that art may indeed be an older alternative (to language) medium of communicating or even of modeling reality is not unattractive. Studies of excisions of the left (language) hemisphere in infancy, to control intractable epilepsy, suggest that language is highly "valued", biologically, and may preferentially take over, from the right hemisphere, processing space to the detriment of spatial skills, being maintained in whatever neural substrate is available (Baynes, 1990). Humphrey (1999) even notes that the cave art of the European Upper Paleolithic (around 30,000 years ago) bears surprising similarities to Nadia's drawings, and therefore argues, provocatively, that the artists, though anatomically modern, may nevertheless have lacked essentially modern minds. Others, conversely, such as Noble and Davidson (1996), argue that you need language, or at least symbolism, to "do" art, and that the presence of art in the archaeological record is a possible marker for the presence of language. I find both arguments unconvincing, though I would indeed be surprised if the Ice Age artists of Europe could not converse (and see Bradshaw, 1997).

An aesthetic sense in nonhuman primates?

Westergaard and Suomi (1997) gave tufted capuchin monkeys, Cebus apella, clay, paint, stones, leaves and sticks. The animals reshaped portable forms with their hands and with stones, and decorated them with leaves and paint. They also marked clay slabs manually, and with stick and stone tools. Westergaard and Suomi also reviewed evidence that chimpanzees readily draw with pen and paper, though "their aesthetic sense is limited, at least from a human perspective" (p. 455). Lenain (1995) notes apes' capacities for introducing variations that appear to be formally relevant and aesthetic, their sense of order and balance and of relevant formal variations, their taste for color contrasts, and their general evidence of visual thinking while engaging in a free and intelligent activity. Similarly Boysen, Bernston, and Prentice (1987) note that chimpanzees do not mark randomly, but pay particular attention to the boundaries of the paper and to the boundaries of predrawn squares. Clearly, at least 5 million years ago the seeds were sown for an artistic sense.

The art and culture of the Mousterian and Acheulian

There is a reluctance among many archaeologists to accept evidence for an aesthetic sense among humans prior to the (western European) Upper Paleolithic "creative explosion" of rock art and artifacts between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago; this date coincides with the apparently sudden appearance of anatomically modern humans in that region, and a technology of considerable sophistication. Many would reject the idea of symbolic activity occurring before the appearance of anatomically modern people in the Upper Paleolithic (Chase & Dibble, 1987), while accepting that there is evidence of an aesthetic sense in the Lower Paleolithic; this is apparently indicated in the pleasing symmetry, which far surpasses functional requirements, of biface tools in the Acheulian, the apparent use of hematite and ochre, the presence in habitation layers of various manuports, objets trouvés and so on of rock crystals, fossils and pebbles naturally shaped to resemble other objects.

What then is the evidence for artistic, aesthetic or even symbolic precedents in the earlier cultures of the Neanderthals, archaic H. sapiens or even H. erectus? Acheulian flint hand axes have been found constructed around Cretaceous fossils which have been preserved in a prominent and aesthetically pleasing location (Oakley, 1981). A scoria pebble from a 250,000 year old Acheulian occupation site of Berekhat Ram on the Golan Heights has been found in the naturally occurring shape of a female figure (Goren-Inbar & Peltz, 1995) with the addition of lines and grooves to accentuate its likeness (d'Errico & Nowell, 2000).

Ochre seems to have been collected (and therefore perhaps used for personal or object decoration) 300,000 years ago in the Acheulian of several regions in Europe (Marshack, 1989). From the same period bones have been reported apparently intentionally engraved with geometric designs (Bahn & Vertut, 1988). Microwear analysis of tools seems to indicate that they had been used to work skins and for boring and reaming (Marshack, 1991). Indeed, Bednarik (1997) reports the presence of cut, shaped and reamed beads from ostrich eggshell in the Acheulian of Libya, 320,000 years ago, though Bahn (personal communication) urges caution.

In the Middle Paleolithic (the Mousterian culture of the Neanderthals), the archaeological record becomes richer and more evocative; however we do not know to what extent this reflects better preservation of more recent material, despite the tendency still to dehumanize this taxon as incompetent at language and symbolic thought, incapable of anticipating expediency, lacking in society, aesthetics, symbolism or culture. There is nevertheless a swing nowadays to accepting that the Neanderthals may not have been so very different from ourselves in their genetic capacity for cultural behavior, and that they may well have enjoyed significant levels of symbolism, language, social structure, conceptual ability, technology and maybe even art (Bednarik, 1995; d'Errico, Zilhão, Julien, Baffier & Pelegrin, 1998; Hayden, 1993).
Composite use by Neanderthals of different materials shaped to predetermined specifications, and their patterns of procurement, suggest planning, organization and economic rationalization. There are now numerous records of bone points, awls, oval ochered bone plaques, finely incised lines and zig-zags, and pendants drilled and prepared from teeth and phalanges (Haydn, 1993; Marshack, 1989). In many respects their tool-making standards cannot easily be achieved today, and the comparatively infrequent finds nowadays may merely reflect the comparatively simple needs of the time. In any case their utilitarian objects often have characteristics apparently in excess of what the technology or function would demand, thereby indicating apparent aesthetic dimensions.

The art of the European Upper Paleolithic

An interest in cave art and engraved objects first developed in the 19th Century, and since then archaeologists, art historians, devoted amateurs and developmental psychologists have all imposed their own idiosyncratic interpretations, from a largely Eurocentric viewpoint. By 35,000 years ago the Aurignacian was well established. It includes pierced or drilled ivory, bone and soft stone beads, fossil coral, fossil belemnites, jet, hematite, pyrite and shell, and often is very beautiful, indicative of the attainment of a modern aesthetic "sense". Material is frequently highly standardized and labor intensive. Utilitarian and ornamental objects were cut, sawn, ground, carved, polished, perforated, and grooved. Figurative three-dimensional images of ivory, steatite or schist were reduced by gouging, grinding and polishing, being finished with fine metallic abrasives of hematite powder. They represented a variety of animals or, more rarely, the human form, or occasionally even "therianthrope" (half-human, half-animal) creatures associated perhaps with cults or ritual (Marshack, 1988).

Though the classic Magdalenian galleries of Lascaux and Altamira are thought to have long post-dated the early Aurignacian cultural flowering, Clottes (cited by Patel, 1995) and Chauvet, Deschamps, and Hillaire (1996) have reported sophisticated rock paintings (e.g. of rhinoceros and bison) created between 30,000 and 33,000 years ago - images which dispel the idea that the first art was simple and crudely drawn, and only later evolved into more sophisticated images. Cruder paintings were probably made by people without talent. The Chauvet-cave images are noteworthy for the techniques used to represent motion and perspective. How many more such examples await discovery? Why is there so little evidence of such art, even by anatomically modern peoples, earlier than 35,000 years ago in other parts of the world? Did such art evolve slowly but suddenly manifest at the right place (caves, where it might be preserved) and the right time (a critical cultural mass or concentration of appropriately oriented individuals)? Why was it done - art for its own sake, as a form of graffiti, as a personal record of events and experiences, as a rite of passage, for religious significance, shamanism, fertility magic, or for several or all of these reasons? Can we answer these questions by analogy with similar, recent practices of cave art in Africa and Australia? Meighan (1996) addresses these issues from an analysis of contemporary "geoglyphs" in Hawaii, and identifies the following themes:

· an "I was here" message
· recording of clan symbols - a form perhaps of territorial marking
· commemoration of events or of the death of notable or loved individuals
· doodling, to while away the time, a form of graffiti, which nevertheless involves some effort and brings some aesthetic satisfaction, at least to the artist.

Quite independently, Mulvaney (1996) records the reminiscences of elderly aborigines in the north west of Australia; they apparently created considerable bodies of such art in rock-shelters while detained during prolonged periods of monsoonal rain - something to do on a rainy day! However the effort and inconvenient inaccessibility of many of the European Upper Paleolithic sites, coupled with the eerie quality of the likely experience, does suggest a religious, mystic or ritual contribution.

The psychology of art

It is facile, but dangerous, to assume that the historical development of art is mirrored in the ontogenetic development of children's art, as a sort of phylogenetic recapitulation. Indeed the parietal (rock) art of 30,000 years ago in Europe is noteworthy for its sophisticated incorporation of natural rocky features, such as a curved ridge (for a spine) or a protuberance (for an eye). Caves with their convoluted, complex surfaces which can be accentuated by the lighting employed offer endless opportunities for the perceiver to impose his or her own interpretative meaning (Halverson, 1992), just as we see images in clouds, frosty window panes, fire, or grained wood panels. Thus a natural rock feature recalling the back of an animal might lead the observer-artist to complete the image, from memory - an image of a prototypical concept of that general animal, rather than a particular animal engaged in a particular activity. Even 30,000 years ago, representations were very economical, and suggestive with a minimum of strokes - cartoon-like, and naturalistic but lacking in photographic realism. Thus an outline generally served as surrogate for a three-dimensional representation. Gestalt principles of figure-ground distinction, closure, grouping and good continuation tended to be observed, with images represented in standard or canonical form or orientation so as to reveal the most salient information, with emphasis of distinctive features. Redundancies of color, texture, linear perspective or completeness of representation all generally were avoided (Halverson, 1992). Relative size differences, for example between an ibex and a horse, tended to be ignored; linear convergence perspective was absent, and figures were often abbreviated or truncated, perhaps portraying heads without bodies.

An artist, ancient or modern, in representing an object, typically three-dimensional, must somehow create another, typically two-dimensional object (unless the latter is sculpted "in the round"), which is conceptually equivalent. This is best achieved by representation of a canonical form from a characteristic angle of view (Deregowski, 1995). Thus not all views of an object are equally recognizable. Indeed with visual agnosia subsequent to brain damage, objects seen from an unusual viewpoint may be particularly hard to recognize (Bradshaw & Mattingley, 1995). Hence artists, ancient or modern, usually choose a predominant, salient or typical aspect. More than one perspective may be combined so as to include all relevant information, whether it is an ancient engraving on a European rock surface, an Australian aboriginal rock painting, or a modern Picasso. Thus an Australian crocodile may have, for reasons of typicality, the body as viewed from above, and the head from the side, leading, to our eyes, to a feeling of torsion or unreality, while clearly the salient crocodilian features are well preserved. While the most informationally-economical representation involves boundaries, contours and transitions (Deregowski, 1995), via outlines especially at points of directional change or transition, inclusion within these contours of color or texture adds verisimilitude. Such verisimilitude, however, comes at a price; movement or action is more easily represented via the posture of "stick" or "pin" figures, though clearly the identity of such figures is then lost.

Lewis-Williams (1997) notes that the fact (disputed by Bahn, personal communication) that so much rock art is located in deep, remote caves, is suggestive of some out of the ordinary, ritual or shamanic purpose. Such circumstances, possible aided by ingestion of hallucinatory drugs, may facilitate, he argues (Lewis-Williams, 1995) the generation of characteristic mental images - luminous, iridescent, pulsating, expanding or contracting; geometric forms, such as dots, meandering lines, zig-zags, grids, curves, circles and stars, may blend and change. He labels these "phosphenes" or "entoptic" (sensu lato) phenomena, which, along with more complex "migrainous" configurations, may be experienced during altered states of consciousness. However we should note that the striate cortex is set up to process such perceptual primitives as points, simple contours and their intersections, and that similar motor primitives (and see Mussa-Ivaldi & Bizzi, 2001) are coincidentally likely for purely biomechanical reasons and the constraints of the basic laws of geometry. It is attractive, but not necessarily correct, to argue that simple dot, line, curve, circle, intersection and finally contour drawing had to precede representational art in the archaeological record, just as it may seem to do so in ontogeny. Note, moreover, that studies of young artist savants like the autistic child Nadia (who possessed superb, imaginative, pictorial draughtmanship, with full perspective, in her first few years of life) show that such 'bottom-up' progression is not in fact the only one.

Feliks (1998) argues that fully representational art was preceded by a natural and already nearly-perfect representational system whose products (fossils) were observed and collected (manuports, objets trouvés) by early humans. Acting as images and substitutes for the real thing, they provided a ready basis for iconic imagery. Fossils may of course have provided templates for an iconography, but I doubt whether they were prime movers. Why not other patterns in nature, tracks in the sand (or even 'doodlings' in the dust - other nonutilitarian human drives manifesting today as graffiti 'ornamentation' of an otherwise plain surface). Indeed the natural world abounds with other objects (shells, nuts, leaves and flowers) and it is not clear why we need to invoke fossils, except to introduce the concept of substitution whereby (see above) a fossilized impression, naturally outlined on a rock surface, substitutes for an image of the living leaf or shell, and provides the idea and even the outline for its formal artistic realization.

Music

Whereas the plastic or visual arts, discussed so far, operate in the spatial mode, music involves temporal extension, with patterns of sound varying in pitch and time, and apparently (like visual art) produced for emotional, social, cultural or cognitive purpose (Gray, et al., 2001). It seems to have many commonalities with sound produced by other living creatures, notably birds, whales (whose calls have long been heard by seafaring tribes through their boats' hulls), and maybe insects. The "songs" (rhythmic, repetitive utterances) of whales have many commonalities with our own in terms of rhythm, phrase length, performance length, "musical" intervals between notes, overall song structure (theme, elaboration, return to modified theme), tone, timbre, and repeating refrains. Birds, too, show many parallels - rhythmic variations, pitch relationships, permutations and combinations of notes, transposition of motifs to different keys, interval inversions, simple harmonic relations, scales used, and countersinging by pairs. Clearly "animal music" may have long predated that of humans, and human speech.

With 4 month old human infants, Tramo (2001) reported preferences, indexed by for example turning biases, for consonant musical intervals (involving major and minor thirds) compared to dissonant intervals (minor seconds). Such findings are paralleled in animal studies. All this suggests that our auditory systems for processing music may have originally evolved for communicatory purposes; indeed, music, like language, is an acoustically-based form of communication with a set of rules for combining a limited number of sounds in an infinite number of ways. Could it even have played a role in the evolution of language? Of course, unlike language, music is highly repetitious and formulaic, and any precursor in the animal kingdom may have been selected for under conditions of runaway sexual selection by males competing for females (Miller, 2000), just as with the exaggerated plumage displays of male birds while courting. (One wonders whether the pleasing, but apparently nonfunctional symmetry of the ancient Acheulian hand-axe may even have played a similar role!) A perforated cave-bear femur from Neanderthal levels at Divje Babe (Slovenia), dated between 43,000 and 67,000 years ago, has been proposed as the World's oldest musical instrument, a flute. However D'Errico, Villa, Llona, and Idarraga (1998) debate whether its holes could instead possibly be the product of damage caused by carnivore teeth.

Evolutionary adaptiveness

An increasingly important concept in modern medical theory is that a disorder may persist in the genome because, with heterozygous representation or low penetrance, it may prove adaptive or protective against worse contingencies (Bradshaw, 2001). Thus the gene for sickle-cell disease may protect against malaria. Bipolar disorder involves episodes of elevated (mania) and lowered (depressed) mood. A genetic component is indicated by family, adoption and twin studies. Jamison (1993) traces the relation (in the manic phase) of bipolar disorder to artistic creativity, energy, exaltation and productivity. As the Roman essayist, Seneca, following Plato 500 years earlier, wrote 2000 years ago, nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit, or loosely, genius is akin to madness. Post (1994) determined the prevalence of depression and bipolar disorder in outstandingly creative individuals from the fields of science, thought, politics and art. Severe personality deviations were particularly frequent in the case of visual artists and writers. Similarly Ludwig (1995) reported lifetime psychopathology rates of creative eminent people in 18 professions, and found very elevated levels primarily in those involved in the arts and writing.

Recently we have had the opportunity to study a sizeable sample (more than 150) of synaesthetes, and to subject a smaller subset (15) to detailed experimental investigation (Mattingley, Rich, Yelland & Bradshaw, 2001). Synaesthesia is an unusual perceptual phenomenon or capacity where events in one sensory modality induce vivid sensations in another. Individuals may "taste" shapes, "hear" colors, or "feel" sounds; there is a strong hereditary component, and females are considerably over-represented. Informally, we were impressed by the very high frequency, in our larger sample, of individuals professing an interest in the visual or literary arts; many claimed that their unusual synaesthetic "gift" helped them in creative activity.
We are left with one final possibility, depressing perhaps to the evolutionary theorist, but maybe somewhat reassuring to the artist who is primarily preoccupied with his or her art; it is that art may indeed be without any evolutionary significance or adaptiveness whatsoever - a mere by product (or "spandrel", to use the marvelous metaphor of Gould & Lewontin, 1979) of a disengaged brain which enlarged under quite different evolutionary pressures (and see also Aiken, 1998). If so, maybe we should after all just sit back and enjoy it. Indeed, to deliberately misquote Plato:

A life without the arts is just not worth the candle.

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