I think what I’ve bolded is too big of an assumption. No explicit evidence, to be sure, but I can’t see any of our behaviors being a fluke or a lucky happenstance. Everything we are prone to do has been the programming of evolution over millennia. While it’s clear a lot of species are capable of communication and procreation, there hasn’t been much in the way of evidence that any other animal on this planet has risen into the same league as our minds.
Also, while there’s been times in history that a revelation has been needed in order for humanity to progress, I also believe there are certain behaviors we do that are innate that never needed precedent in order to proliferate. While the list is short on what humans can do that other species haven’t shown (I’ll concede – yet), it’s been enough for us to create everything we see, do, and use today. In order for what the elephant is doing to be called art or even hold meaning, I’d think other elephants would need to recognize and comprehend it as such. Can another elephant see what Hong did, and consciously recreate it? If not, why not?
I wish we could give a healthy, 6 year old kid a crayon. One that’s never seen a drawing, painting, or any kind of symbol or method of written communication before, and lock him in a room for a week with some paper.
I think we’d all be surprised what would fill those sheets after seven days.
The thing that would be most remarkable about the painting, if it is a genuine artistic effort by the elephant (rather than just something slavishly learned, or directed minutely by the keeper) is the legs - painting in the two legs partially obscured by the nearer two - human children take quite a while to learn to be able to paint one object partially obscured by another - represented by them overlapping on the paper.
Before they learn the skill, they paint the two objects side by side, or one on top of the other.
If the elephant drew the picture from real life, then it’s an incredible evidence of cognition. If it copied it from an example, it’s just a neat trick.
I agree. I think it’s clearly the case, at this point, that Hong has been thoroughly trained, but that said, IIRC, it was quite some time before humans got the idea of foreshortening and perspective.
Although, there’s not much of that in Hong’s painting. Merely occlusion, but it’s along the same lines. Also, I would think, further evidence of gross human intervention here.
That’s what I meant - occlusion in drawings is a sign of well-developed cognition - little kids who may be able to paint a picture of an apple quite nicely, generally can’t accurately paint a picture of an apple partly hiding an orange - they’ll draw an apple underneath an orange, or next to it, or sometimes, an apple encircled by an orange
The ability to paint one partly occluding the other represents a milestone in children’s development, I believe - and there are tests based on whether or not they can do it.
That noble savage stuff tends not to pan out - something about parts of the brain only developing through exposure and interaction. IIRC studies of feral children have shown that once a window of growth opportunity has passed, children no longer have the capacity to learn certain things.
My kids developed an interest in drawing pretty young, particularly my daughter. Before she was 3 she could draw a face that looked somewhat like a face - the one she did of me looks like me, and is markedly different from the one she did of her brother. I haven’t noticed any occlusion, though, I’ll have to watch for that. Typically I stay clear away from their art-making and just enjoy the results (whatever they might be).
What really makes the elephant’s work look like a trained activity, to me, is the way those flowers are painted. The one that elephant is holding is a bit large, and the ones drawn by other elephants are presented from a side angle, as though sitting on a table. I’d think that an elephant’s most common view of flowers, in their typical daily experience, would be from the top down, not from the side. If he’s working from his own memory, THAT is what he’d paint.
However, I think it’s fascinating that these elephants stay on the paper and fill the page. Children generally struggle to contain their art within a piece of paper – and adults tend to create work that’s out of balance.
He may not be painting elephants or flowers per se, but I’d say that pachyderm has a good eye!
Well, I was meaning a regular kid, just never being exposed to writing or art. Everything else being equal (and un-feral), I don’t think he’d eat it. Maybe merely take a nibble?
He might even figure out that crayon sharpener in the back doesn’t do shit.
Personally I have a hard time picturing (arr-arr) a 6-yr-old who’s never been exposed to any visual media. No television? Photographs? Magazines? Books? Boxes of cereal? Sticks with which to scratch in the mud?
True.
I have a copy somewhere - it’s a wonderfully subtle poke at art critics and enthusiasts, pet worshippers and various other categories of human insanity. Nowhere in the book does it admit to being a joke, but it gets more and more far fetched until it can’t possibly be taken seriously.
Every known human society, however primitive, has all sorts of art as part of its culture. You could certainly find plenty of children who hadn’t been exposed to your examples, but they’d still see carvings, rock paintings, or something along those lines. You’d have to find some child who had been horribly deprived of almost all human contact, and in that case, the child would probably be developmentally disabled. Sort of like the tragic case of Genie.
Well, of course. I was just speaking rhetorically. Just trying to strengthen the thought that the average person would be inclined to draw, even had they never been exposed to such a now ubiquitous practice (see Chronos’s first sentence). So hey! A stick in the mud would actually count!
Burton Silver (the Co-Author) is better known as a cartoonist here. Even then, it took a while before the cat was out of the bag (so to speak). They followed it up with Why Paint Cats, and Famous Painted Cats.
Were the elephant handlers previously involved in the entertainment industry?
Seriously, the long nosed beasties paint as well as I do when I practice, possibly better. I hope they get their food treats regularly - they’re earning them.
Many humans could spontaneously draw that. hell I could spontaneously draw that, and I’m a very mediocre artist. Just to prove this is the case, when Europeans arrived in Australia they had never seen a picture of a kangaroo or anything remotely like a kangaroo. When they wanted to draw a kangaroo they had to spontaneously draw it, with no refrence to previous kangaroo pictures. And what they produced looked like this.
That is the kind of spontaneous image that a human would spontaenously draw of an animal that it has never drawn before and never seen drawn before. And it is far, far better than that elephant’s painting.
You have apparently never seen cave paintings. Cave paintings are in no way ugly, even by the most extreme subjective standards of ugliness. They are as beuatiful and detailed as a pinting can be given the materials used.
Heres is cave painting of a horse about 20, 000 years old. Here a bison about 25, 000 years. Here a group of abstract humanoids around 15, 000 years. Those paintaings are all beautiful and drawn with amazing grace, precision and defintion. Perhaps you could explain in what way those pictures are ugly and how you would improve on them and make them more attractive, bearing in mind that your materials are a rough rock wall, ground rock pigments and a chewed stick for a brush.
And as for your claim that cave paintings are an evolution of sand drawings or body painting: CITE. I have never heard anyone make such a cliam before, and from what we know of those few contemporary HG groups, body art, bark and snad paintings and parietal art are all completely different artistic styles with difefrent purposes and show no overlap at all in subject matter or mode of execution. So can we please have some evidence that one style evolved from the other?
Again: CITE.
Seriously, what is this assertion based on. What we know about human art is that it didn’t exist at all until ~ 50, 000 years ago, and then it shows up fully formed at distant locations worldwide. Not as crappy doodles but as perfect representations in the form of sculpture, paintings, decorative clothing and musical instruments. Objects so well made that we recognise them immediately for what they are, and as well made as anything that was going to be produced for the next 40, 000 years at least, and in most cases as good as anything a human could possibly make with the materials used.
I really would like to see you present some evdience for your claim that a human who has never seen a draiwng would produce a crppy doodle initially. All the evidence we have says that once they get the hang of the mechanical process of holding a brush or crayon a human immeditaely starts to produce fully formed art. I’m willing to accept it might take a period of experimentation to consolidate a style, but the idea that it woudl be a crappy doodle is somehting you really need to produce some evidence for.
What is that claim based on? IOW: CITE!
Sorry, but that is provably nonsense.
Have look art the rock art of Australia, the temple reliefs of the Maya and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. All are artistuically distinct, in fact all are unique. Everyone I have ever met or read of agrees that all are good art. And yet all were developed in total isolation from and ignroance of the others.
Quite clearly “good” art is an absolute. It is not simply a learned adherence to a standard because the peopel of Australia, the Maya and Michealangelo never had any opportunity to learn from one another and they quite clearly weren’t all adhering to the same standard. yet al produced good art that all would agree is good, depsite not following or learning form any common souurce whatsoever.
Aart that is meant to be directly representative of reality is good in a sense that everyone agrees with. Non-abstract work has a standard of good that is inherent in the human miond and is not leraned or the result of adherence to learned rules.
So how do you explain that cultures on continents that had been isolated from one another for 30, 00o years produced art that people on the other continent still find to be good art? Are you suggesting that the standard was telepetahically and subconsciously spread across the continents?
The only other possibility seems to be that the standard of good art is inherent in the modern human brina, something that all psychologists agree is true. But if thta is the case thenit demlished oyur own position. Humans strive to create good are because humans have an inherent knowledge of what we are striving for. Elephants can’t create good art because elephants can’t even know whether art is good or bad.
The problem with your argument is that there is no evidence that elephants do indulge in trial and error attempts to represent reality.
Elephants can be trained to repeat specific brush strokes. Elephants also make doodles on paper that look nothing like reality. But an there is no evidence that after 10 years any elephant has ever become better at representing reality than it was the very day it was first trained to paint. In contrast every single human painter in history has shown inprovement in their ability to represent reality. Humans as individuals and as cultures do indeed strive to make thier art better fit the intuitive human standard of good art. Any artist who has ever kept their earliest works can show you exmaples that prove this objectively. You have done this yourself. There is no evidence that any elephant has ever done so.
So your theory that elephants strive to find compositions that better fit a standard of good has no factual basis at all.
It’s clearly a hoax. The way the trunk moves is how an arm and hand in a trunk “suit” would move. There are on a few places where any real video trickery is needed, the rest are just a person with truck puppet on their arm.
I’m surprised this debate raged on for 45 posts after DMC posted a cite that said the exact elephant in question painted through a “series of learned brushstrokes” not “on her own.”
And, like I said, still pretty cool even if it’s rote.
So you’re implying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and that nothing is new and everything is learned and only slightly improved?
Have you bothered to listen to Top-40 radio lately? talk about innovation!
