1) The term paleoanthropsychobiological was coined by Ellen Dissanayake and is basically a lot of little sub words put into one to make it one big idea (if that even makes sense). The word means that art is something that goes far back to the paleolithic era, is something that can be traced across cultures, and that art is something that is biologically embedded in humans.

2) When Dissanayake uses the phrase “making special,” she is describing making something different from the ordinary, or “not normal.”  She claims that making something special (the action) is the definition of art.  She also claims that the act of “making special” was crucial to human survival. She used the examples of ritual ceremonies that were unique and special ways of communicating and socializing with the community.  She argued that this act of making the ceremonies special unified the community and made it to where communities that held these rituals would have more surviving offspring than those who did not.  This act of “making special” is art itself so therefore, art is essential to human survival.

3) The first period of art that Dissanayake points out is medieval times.  During this period art was considered the “service of religion”(16).  Art was not thought of as “‘aesthetically,’ if this means separately from their revelation of the Divine”(16).  This meant that art was not thought of for its beauty or for personal pleasure unless it was enjoyed from a Divine perspective (an experience through religion).

The second period I would like to address is during the 18th century: Modernism.  This is when art was beginning to be thought of aesthetically.  During this period, there emerged the idea of “disinterest” which meant “[an] attitude that is separate from one’s own personal interest in the objet, its utility, or its social or religious ramifications”(17).  This meant that art was being looked at by stepping out of one’s own opinions and looking at it from a non bias viewpoint.  Almost from a different perspective.  This “disinterested attitude” allowed viewers to appreciate art from a different time period because it didn’t matter if they “understood” what was physically in the painting, but rather the beauty of the painting as a whole.

The third, and final, period I would like to touch on is postmodernism.  This viewpoint emphasized the interpretation of the artwork rather than the artwork itself: “…assumption that interpretation is indispensable to appreciating and even identifying artworks…”(19).  They suggest that individuals’ interpretation of an artwork comes from their own point of view and is unique to each individual: “…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 assumptions that characterize individuals…”(19).  Postmodernists also believe that “art is not universal”(19).  They believe art is relative to each individual and it is “conceptually constructed by individuals whose perceptions are necessarily limited and parochial” (19).