I've been thinking a lot lately about what art is. Or rather, what is it for? It seems so entangled with the human condition and yet to verbalize a purpose for it seems strange. Is that banana duct taped on the wall art? It's one thing to claim it's bad art; it's another to claim it's not art at all. But of course, there are things in the world that are art and there are things that are not. There must be a dividing line somewhere, surely.

I'm not really interested in telling people what they do isn't art. Rather, what is art doing? Why do we feel compelled to do things that we call art?

I have a couple ideas. One is that making art is an extension of our desire to act upon the world, to claim territory, to extend one's life beyond themselves. By making art, I create something that acts upon the world and yet will outlive my physical body.

Another is communication. Spoken language is useful for communicating some ideas, and not useful for others. I endeavor to communicate something new with all the art that I create, whether that's a whole new phenomenon or an aspect of one. If an idea has already been communicated in a piece of art, why would I not just point someone towards that piece of art?

Art is also soothing. Creation and observation channel our aesthetic sensibilities according to our desires. Is life not just pleasure seeking?

There are artworks that channel each of these sensibilities to different extents, obviously. But I would be hard pressed to find something that people recognize as art that doesn't do at least one of these three things.

I wrote a short story (or rather, a short short story) about the origin of cave paintings. I'm about to explain my intention behind that story, which kind of defeats the purpose of the thing but whatever. I've been told that art shouldn't be explained, that it should be able to stand on its own. In fact, by explaining art you make, you take away its power to communicate. I get that, sort of. I think it's a different kind of communication, from a different angle. Or rather, some of the work is done for you, perhaps. And the power of art is the process of observing it and interpreting it.

I'm a believer that you should view the art independent of explanation first. You can always revisit it with more context, but not the other way around — knowledge is one of those things that only goes in one direction. I don't see the harm in revisiting it. Of course this gets into whether the “true” meaning of a piece of art is the artist's intent or what the observer gets from it (I think that's semantics tbh).

But anyway, the short story. Read it first if you want. I don't think it's super good or anything — I just wanted to put it out there.

Why did prehistoric humans make cave paintings? Perhaps it was practical. Perhaps they served some sort of role. But what could be the role of hand stencils? I can't help but wonder if these pieces captured when we woke up, when humans gained self-consciousness and could understand it as such. Perhaps these paintings, made by humans without complex language, were desperate attempts to reach across the gap, to say “I'm here too.”

Of course, there was likely consciousness before we could articulate it. But at some point we gained consciousness, and at some point after that (probably) we communicated that idea. I don't see monkeys having conversations about consciousness. So I would suppose this was a human event.

There's an additional moment after understanding your own consciousness of understanding other people as subjects, as minds like yours. This could have happened at the moment of this kind of conversation. And how could a spoken language developed for survival properly articulate this thought? Art, on the other hand, isn't bound by phonemes.

Is it a coincidence that we witness art at the dawn of civilization? What if art was the spark of civilization? The realization that we are all here together is potentially a powerful one. The realization of will, that we can build something bigger together, could have been tied to this.

We can never know what these cave paintings were actually for. We can only take educated guesses now. But someone had to be the first, and they had to have had a reason.