The term paleoanthropsychobiological was coined by author and art history major Ellen Dissanayake. The term is an adjective that she likes to use to describe how art encompasses human history, all human societies, and that art is a “psychological or emotional need and has psychological or emotional effects”(15). She combines an approach to art through Paleolithic, anthropological, and biological terms to speak about the idea of what art is really for. The way that she sees it “art must be viewed as an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species”(15).

When Dissanayake is talking about the phrase “making special” she is referring to the way that humans put a value onto things that they care deeply about. It is a phrase that she likes to use in referencing back to how art making and and experiencing art are human behaviors. I think that “making special” is related to art because humans tend to put a value on art as it usually evokes some sort of emotional response. In that sense art has moved from being a “form” to being a form that we care deeply about. In relation to human survival if we did not put value on certain things or have a strong personal connection to the world we live in it would turn us from the intricate and emotional beings that we are, to lifeless walking blobs of skin, bones, and fat. We “make special” our world because if we didn’t I think we would lose every sense of emotion that art evokes.

Three different theories/movement/periods that came to my mind were the Renaissance, modernist and post-modernist periods. The Renaissance movement was alive and well during the medieval time period where Renaissance artists “gradually replaced God-centered with man centered concerns” and the work focused on “using craftsman-lie standards of beauty, harmony and excellence” (16).  In the modernist period, stemming out of the 18th century, works focused even more about aesthetics. The focus of this theory was on defining what “fine” works of art were by being in a “special frame of mind for appreciating works of art–a ‘disinterested’ attitude”(17).  The works of art that met this criteria were ones that “became a world in itself, made solely or primarily as an occasion for this kind of detached aesthetic experience, which was considered to be one of the highest forms of mentality”(18). Postmodernism took place in the 20th century and was a theory that focused on questioning the values that the elite had put on works of art. Postmodernists idea was that rather than assume that “art reflects a unique and privileged kind of knowledge” it instead “points out that any ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ is only a point of view”(19).