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Art are matters that are expressive, evocative, made/produced/performed. Language as symbol based communication ability leads toward a question about the place non-utilitarian making, productions among humans.

Lascaux, painting on cave wall, made 20k years ago.

Music? Not necessarily symbolic, it is sound, it requires time, more than pleasant noise, more than one sound, sounds need to be related aurally to one another. Music is evocative, and expressive. It may be universal among humans, but it usually only for the group out of which it comes.

Womb music - lullabies - universal characteristics - high pitch, slow tempo, distinctive tones (Sandra Trehib). Tura Lura Lura. Susurrations - surf sounds. Some ethnobiologists say soothing lullabies can be seen as conferring a survival advantage (hyenas don't hear a quiet baby, rested mothers are better at mothering).

Music pulls us together with group - and only in smoothly functioning groups has humankind survived and flourished. therefore choruses, symphonies, garage bands and the beat beat beat of the drums. Music as reunification or reaffirmation of union. Think anthems "Les enfant de la Patrie..." "...and the rockets red glare..., "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles..."

Early evidence of music - Divje Flute - the picture above is a flute or recorder type instrument found in a cave in Slovenia. Dated to about 40,000 years before present.

 Symbolic work is often about 'truth' - can this sound, morph, sentence, gesture stand in for something that is. Can it be made to count for or count as something such that a 'we' are on the same page - a tripartite agreement between self-listener-object. Expressive material isn't usually asked to stand this test of truth. It is always real in itself if it is at all successful at evoking or expressing anything. But it stands a test for beauty/ugly -an aesthetic test - and it may be that soc/cult/history work done prepares us to respond to an object, allowing it to express -to press something out of us.

Art has a few characteristics 1 -it is made. 2 - it is evocative/expressive. 3 - something about it is not instrumental - useful for some other purpose, its not a technique. Not to say that it can't be useful, -just that that is not its end. Not to say that it can't be symbolic, illustrative of something else - if it is then truth climbs in with beauty.

Art and Religion

Art, no less than philosophy, stretches toward the ineffable, the mysterious, the confusing.

House to capture dangerous spirits above (Indochina), Taj Mahal below

Early Art

Blombos cave on Indian Ocean in South Africa - decorative shells, finely made incisions - maybe 70,000 years before present

Metropolitan Museum Chronology of Art

Beloit College has a clear presentation on the timeline of human art

Tour of PecheMerle Cave - dotted horses may be 25,000 years old

Neolithic Caves - Lascaux and Altamira

Outline of hand, pigment blown onto wall 20,000 years ago
 

Art and Craftsmanship

What does Art do?

There is a kind of perspective used in some of the cave paintings - the bulge of a rock becoming the bulge of a auroch's belly in the representation, the curve of a rock 'reads' as the shape of a horse's head. I wonder if the early artist 'recognized the horse when he/she looked at the curve of rock wall, and added to what was recognized with their own effort - the person was remediating/improving the presence of horsiness that they had first recognized in the dimly seen shape and bulges of the cave's walls. The capacity to be reminded, or the capacity to mimic and also to note mimicry is here.If this is the early impulse, then what we are looking at is not symbol, but synecdoche - maybe art can precede language - music is the sound of what it evokes.

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