University of Washington Press Art and Intimacy

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love. Today we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity and fecundity that affected their survival. Now we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in art like behaviour, then we actually need the arts. Even--or perhaps especially--in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things. Ellen Dissanayake is the author of Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and What Is Art For?