Paleoanthropsychobiological is coined by Ellen Dissanayake. This is a really strange word to me. I couldn’t understand the meaning of it until I read the definition several times. Paleoanthropsychobiological is refer to art. It has 3 concepts:  human history, human societies and human psychological or emotional feelings. Dissanayake try to tell us that art -Paleoanthropsychobiological is human-based and it  shows human’s wish and how this wish can change human’s society.

“Making special” shows that individual wants to be unique and everyone has this special wish. According to Dissanayake, “Making special’ is a fundamental human proclivity or need”(Dissanayake 1991). Human want to show their special parts because they want others know they are different, they are unique. And art is also special and unique. The core element is the same. For human survival, it is the same because if you want to live better, you need to be special so that other people will revere you and you will get a better job and possible better future.

There are three methods of art : ideology, interpretation and life’s sake. Ideology for art is an idea from 18th century that people trying to manage the definition of fine art based on people’s “taste and beauty”(Dissanyake 1991). With the time flows, in the mid-twentieth century, people start to define art with “flatness, purity and picture plan”(Dissanyake 1991).  Art work can not just be a simple random paining, but it should be an object with patient and carefulness and love. With no feeling for the project, this project can hardly be a fine art work.

Interpretation represents that art can have many forms and arts does not just reflect single kind of knowledge, but it also shows the connection between art and human belief. By that I mean the form of art is not limited by specific rules. Art can be presented in many special ways. Interpretation shows in modernism.

For life’s sake, it is more like a special view of art from each human beings and everyone has their unique setting for art. On the other word, the definition of art can be really different base on different group of people.  Everyone has their own special value for art  and they want to show others their unique feeling for art. This is the meaning of special and this is why individual can be so different. Since everyone can hardly have a same value of object, people cannot simply accept others’ art.

 

What is art? This is a very interesting question. According to Wikipedia,  “Art  is a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities; this article focus primarily on the visual arts.” I can read art as something beautiful in different forms. This means art is a translator of beauty and there are many forms of being beautiful. Based on the Ted Talk “A Darwinian theory of beauty” by Denis Dutton, beautiful can be four forms- “human beings, natural land forms, works of art and skilled human action”(Denis 2014). Everyone has a  different sight of what is art, on the other word, what is beauty. The differences are based on different taste of beauty and different taste of beauty is caused by different culture and living environment, like childhood. For me, I really love some types of music, not all the music, but the type I like. Here is a link and example of the music I like-” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ba_WoSZXvw&list=WL&index=46″. For this kind of music, I see them as art work and like so many people, they see or hear something they like as art and beauty. In my opinion,  art and beauty are connected together. People see  something as an art work usually means this thing provides an intensity of pleasure. This  is nature selection. Everyone grow up in different environment and their taste of beauty is changing through the path of their growing. Some people may like traveling a lot. I think it is a response of they love natural land forms or different culture environment. And these people may have seen beautiful land forms in the childhood which makes them liking natural land forms. Art can be so difficult to define because art itself is so different in everyone’s mind. If you see it as an art, it  is an art.