1. The term paleoanthropsychobiological was coined by Ellen Dissanayake in her article “What is Art For?” and can be described as her view on art that “must be viewed as an inherent universal trait of the human species” (Dissanayake 1).  In other words, she believes that the history of art and art itself is a universal perspective.

2. To make something special it must be something that is unordinary or not seen everyday and must impact the person in a significant way. For art to be made special implies that there is a lot of meaning and intention behind it and can truly impact us to adapt new values and emotions. This ultimately affects human survival as we adapt to things that are special to us as individuals and can impact our decision making.

3. Three theories that Dissanayake mentions in her article include modernism, postmodernism, and western concept of fine art. The development of the western concept of fine art she discusses developed up through the 18th century and was shaped by the great minds of Plato and Aristotle who did not mention art specifically but used beauty to describe the understanding we had with daily tasks or activities. This emphasized the value of reason on art and developed the true thinking behind fine art, not being restricted to what we may simply think is art. Modernism was a belief of art as an ideology and happened in the 18th century through the 20th century. American critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg challenged previous beliefs of what we believed to be art as the appeal of aesthetics were introduced into art. Finally, postmodernism is currently happening as it integrates the idea of art being an interpretation. Postmodernism believes, “Artists, just like everybody else, do not see the world in any singularly privileged or objectively truthful way, but rather-like everybody-interpret it according to their individual and cultural sensibilities” (Dissanayake 5). This is showing how the idea of self interpretation has been introduced and is encouraged to challenge the art and previous beliefs of art.

This article by Ellen Dissanayake discusses the idea of art and the different ways and periods through which it has progressed. I felt the modernism period of art really related to me as the theme of ideology started to become introduced in this period. As described in the article, “The work of art became a world-in-itself, made solely or primarily as an occasion for this kind of detached aesthetic experience” (Dissanayake 4). I feel this relates to me personally of how I look at art. I see art all around us in our everyday lives and they can really bring another element to our lives as they are a special experience that can provide a lot of value to people. Through this, art became universal and was seen as something that everyone could relate to. The part of this period that I did not appreciate was how they talked about criticism of art becoming an elite idea and that only few could correctly do this task. I feel this is wrong because everybody brings different insights on different subjects and it is unfair to discount someone else’s claim simply because they may not be as qualified as someone else is to critique it.

The video this week talked a lot about beauty and how it is related to evolution. Beauty has evolved many things in this world to give people pleasure by simply looking at them and that is something that art tries to imitate. Art tries to evoke beauty in different ways and get people interested in it, but also challenges people to look further than simplistic beauties. The one remaining question that I had after this weeks lecture and reading was how does this beauty in art challenge people and what ideas does it introduce to try and shape people’s own personal values? For me art speaks in different ways to different people and getting insight from others on their perspectives is very beneficial in understanding what art is trying to provoke. Ultimately, this can lead to a lot of different ways of thinking, good or bad, and can lead to people wanting to emulate the values displayed in art.