In Ellen Dissanayake essay, “Art for Life’s Sake” explores interesting views of the history and now of art. She briefly discusses the late history of art and how it was viewed and then moves into more recent ideas of art. During the modernist era of art, good art was defined by a price tag that was decided by educated elites who could afford to be knowledgable about art. This progresses into the postmodernist time where some seemed to fight the modernist idea by defining good art as obscure forms. Both modernism and postmodernism define a type of art as “good.” All of this leads Dissanayake to define her own ideas and opinions of how art value should be evaluated.
Coined by Ellen Dissanayake palaeoanthropsychobiological is a term that refers to humans needing art to for survival. Art has been around for thousands of years, and from the beginning groups of people have used art as a way to create a special event while spending time together and bonding as a society. She also discusses how the idea of what art is evolves over times and societies.
Dissanayake brings up the phrase “making special” numerous times when referring to palaeoanthropsychobiological, “Making special is a fundamental human proclivity of need. We can see in such simple things as when we cook special meals …” (25). Dissanayake argues that it isn’t necessarily about the end piece of the art, but rather the action of working to make something special. Some of the special events Dissanayake refers to include rituals and body painting; creative events groups of people participated in together that created a stronger bond within their society. She argues that these events are essential to the furture of a group of people. We have a psychological and emotional need for “making special.”
In her essay, Dissanayake describes multiple periods of art history and her opinions of each. She goes as far back as Ancient Greek times explaining that we may be misinformed about this period because of the translations (i.e. we figure that a certain word they used refers to art). Either way, during these periods art revolved around religion and not the ability to be aesthetically pleasing. In the modernism period of art, the term “aesthetics” was highly praised. The 18th century art ideology left the elite and well-educated in charge of defining the value art’s value, “Art had become if not a religion, an ideology whose principles were articulated by and for the few who had leisure and education enough to acquire them” (18). Following modernism was postmodernism with the ideology to leave art to interpretation. The postmodernists set out to do the opposite of the modernists, “Rather than assuming that art reflects a unique and privileged kind of knowledge, postmodernists point out that any ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ is only a point of view – a ‘representation’ that comes to us mediated and conditioned by our language, our social institutions, the assumption that characterize individuals as members of a nation, a race, a gender, a class, a profession, a religious body, a particular historical period” (19). In postmodernism, the belief of art being universal is not believed, but rather art is conceptual. Instead of art being found in a museum, it found on the street. These various ideas led Dissanayake to develop her own opinion of art, where it is a “universal trait of the human species” (15); a trait that is necessary for survival.