The Thing with Feathers (24 page)

Art must involve some kind of skill, in execution or idea, and the application of that skill to a result that may be experienced by both artist and viewer. There is nothing inherent to the concept of art that limits it to humans—although some dictionaries include this in their definitions, as art is almost always referred to in the context of people. Art usually involves some type of aesthetic sense of beauty (though beauty is also difficult to define), creativity, and imagination. It affects the senses or emotions of its audience, either toward a particular message or an open-ended reaction. Art is a form of communication.

In 2012, evolutionary biologist John Endler published a paper, “Bowerbirds, Art, and Aesthetics,” in which he tackled the question head-on after completing a series of field experiments with great bowerbirds. To the extent that defining an artist is scientifically possible, Endler pursued a line of reasonable logic: Come up with a definition of art that fits most accepted standards, then see whether bowerbirds qualify.

He settled on a biological definition of visual art as “the creation of an external visual pattern by one individual in order to influence the behavior of others.” In this sense, art is a signal that functions exactly the same way as any signal produced by the body, which could be viewed by an audience and could even result in mating with the artist. By this definition, both humans and bowerbirds produce art.

Endler went a step further and tried to define aesthetics in the context of bowerbird art, which was tricky because an aesthetic sense is usually attributed to appreciation of beauty, and beauty is a human standard. He cut beauty out of his definition entirely and turned to Darwinian logic. Endler argued that
aesthetics involve an “exercise of judgment” among art objects, which leads to a “change in fitness”—the ability to survive and reproduce—in the artist and judge. So every time someone picks one work of art over another, life is impacted on an evolutionary scale for both artist and audience. It’s an intriguing idea.

This whole argument assumes that bowerbirds can visually rank one bower over the next, which isn’t by any means a given. But one of Endler’s own field experiments offers evidence that they do, with a fascinating conclusion.

He wanted to understand how male great bowerbirds design their bowers to best woo a female into mating. The courtship ritual is straightforward. When a female visits a bower, she typically walks around the outside to inspect the handiwork before stepping into the avenue created between the parallel walls of upright twigs. At this point, the male, quite excited, runs to the “court” of collected objects in front of the female and frenetically picks up his most prized possessions, one by one—perhaps starting with a bright clothespin—and waves them in front of her while fanning the pink party crest on the back of his head. Instead of standing on top of the pile, which would block her view of all the objects, he angles his body off to one side, and the female can see only his head poking through the entrance. She makes her decision based on this performance.

The ritual is essentially a theater production, with the audience (the female) in its designated seat (the bower) and the performer (the male) on stage (the court). The female has no choice but to watch from a place that has been predetermined by the male. This means that the odds are shifted a bit: She may make the final decision, but he can use performance tricks to influence her judgment.

Endler found that the layout of objects around the bower is
far from random. Male great bowerbirds place larger objects progressively farther away from the entrance, creating a forced perspective—from the female’s viewpoint, looking out, they all seem the same size. This is definitely on purpose. When the objects are experimentally rearranged, male bowerbirds reposition them within a few days, and, while working on the array, they will often walk into the bower and peek out as if imagining what the female will see. The perspective creates an illusion that objects farther from the bower are smaller than they really are, and, correspondingly, that the male beside them is larger than he really is.

Forced perspective has been used by human artists for centuries. Ever taken the classic tourist photo where you stand with a mountain in the background and reach your hand over it, seemingly resting your fingertip on its summit from the camera’s viewpoint? That’s an extreme example, in which the mountain looks to be two inches tall. Michelangelo used forced perspective on his statue of David in a more subtle way—as the sculpture was meant to be viewed from below, he enlarged the torso and head slightly so that they wouldn’t seem to be dwarfed by the feet (the effect is obvious when viewed from the side). The Greeks made their columns narrower at the top so they would look taller. Architects of the Cinderella castle at Disneyland designed tiny turrets for the roof that would fade into the distance, making the castle appear larger than life. The illusion depends on an audience observing from a predictable viewpoint, like a female bowerbird hunkered inside the bower. Male bowerbirds have learned the trick.

When Endler analyzed the mating success of each individual bowerbird in his study, he discovered that the males who got the most action had created bowers with the most regular geometry, best forced perspective, and deepest visual illusions.
This showed that females could distinguish between visual patterns of varying quality. And because these choices affected mating success for both males and females, the study showed that bowerbirds, according to Endler’s definition, do have an aesthetic sense.

Other animals build structures, some even decorated. Many birds camouflage their nests by using material matching their surroundings. The great crested flycatcher of North America habitually hangs snakeskins from its nest, which is thought to ward off predators. Some spiders add special silk decorations to their webs that may attract insects or deceive birds. By Endler’s definition of art—creating an external visual pattern to influence the behavior of others—all of these animals qualify as artists. But in each case, these structures also have a separate purpose: Nests are shelters; webs catch food.

There’s nothing wrong with functional artwork; just about anything with a practical use can be made artistically. Some would say that good design of everyday objects—chairs, computer graphics, clothing—is an artistic discipline. But what we generally think of as art, what we call “fine art,” most likely to be found in a gallery or museum, usually doesn’t have a function besides visual communication. The primary goal is to influence the viewer’s emotions and behavior.

By this narrower, art-for-art’s-sake definition, Endler believes that bird nests, spiderwebs, and all other animal structures are ruled out—with the singular exception of bowerbird bowers, which have no physical function. Only bowerbirds and humans, he says, create and exhibit objects with the sole purpose of modifying the behavior of their viewers. And this, I believe, leads to a tantalizing conclusion, that if a well-designed bower is more like a Picasso painting than a piece of furniture, then the bowerbird is no mere carpenter—he is Picasso himself.

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HUMANS BEGAN CREATING ART
at least 40,000 years ago, decorating European caves with realistic paintings that are still visible today. We don’t know how or why our early ancestors felt the need to make representations of their surroundings, but the stenciled images of animals and human hands—interspersed among a lot of abstract doodles—are haunting. Cave paintings remind us that art has been part of the human condition for a long, long time.

Just how we became so fascinated with art is the subject of major dispute among historians and biologists. Its origins are hidden in the early mists of painting, writing, music, language, dance, theater, and religion, which overlap increasingly as we plumb the depths of history. These disciplines collectively express the human brain’s capacity for abstract thought, representing ideas with shapes, sounds, and movements—an advanced mental ability that first allowed us to develop modern culture. All art is abstract in this sense, and it requires processing power from any artist.

Some argue that art developed as a by-product of our powerful brains, others say that art gave us an evolutionary advantage and was born of strict Darwinian selection, and still others see art as a product of social culture. However you look at it, visual art has been found in virtually every human society for which records exist, qualifying art as a human universal. But is it just for humans?

An art professor from New Zealand, Denis Dutton, makes the case in his recent book
The Art Instinct
that art evolved in humans the same way that peacocks got long tails, through pure natural selection. Art, he says, helps people find a mate. Quality paintings and sculptures convey status and, if they are
presented by the artist, display personal skill. The same is true of other arts: Music is the language of seduction, dance is a courtship ritual, and so on. We value art because it represents wealth and achievement. Art is useful, gives an advantage to those who practice it, and so, logically, has become integrated into the very core of human being.

By making this argument, Dutton allows the possibility that art isn’t restricted to humans. Because the force of natural selection acts on all life-forms equally, there is little reason to suspect that artistry would evolve only in people.

The title of his book reflects this shift in thinking. Art is usually considered a creative process, but Dutton suggests that we have less control over it than we realize, that we are driven to make art by innate tendencies that have evolved over aeons. As it happens, this is probably the most compelling argument
against
artistry existing in bowerbirds because it implies that the birds aren’t creative, but that they make their designs entirely by instinct. All great bowerbirds build walls of twigs decorated with the same assortments of loose objects. Because the form doesn’t vary much from one bird to the next, it can hardly be considered imaginative.

But even bowerbirds show glimmers of inventiveness, as the geography professor Jared Diamond demonstrated in the early 1980s, years before he wrote
Guns, Germs, and Steel
and other books that made him famous. While doing fieldwork in remote New Guinea, Diamond discovered a previously unknown population of Vogelkop bowerbirds, the species that builds elaborate triangular huts surrounded by mats of moss and colorful objects. This new, isolated population looked and behaved the same as previously studied birds, but seemed to prefer brown and black decorations instead of bright colors—a sort of goth subculture. Diamond wondered how they could
have learned new tastes, and decided to conduct an experiment to find out.

Out in the rainforest, Diamond scattered seven different colors of poker chips near bowers to see whether the birds would incorporate the novel objects into their displays. This was nothing new; bowerbirds in other areas readily snapped up human trash. Diamond really wanted to test whether individual birds have personal visual preferences, and he supplied the poker chips just to ensure that all the bowerbirds had access to the same materials.

He found that most traditional Vogelkop bowerbirds went crazy for the poker chips, especially the bright blue and red ones. They were so popular that neighboring males frequently stole them from other birds’ displays, forcing Diamond to number them just to keep track of which chips went where. But the birds of the new population, which liked dark berries and rocks, never touched the poker chips. It seemed that they had developed a new aesthetic standard, while in all other ways remaining alike to the other birds. Because the populations were now separated by their visual tastes, with females choosing males having either bright or dark bower decorations, the birds had become reproductively isolated from each other. The implication was startling: If this trend continued, aesthetic preference would eventually lead to two different species of bowerbirds. Instead of evolution driving art, art was driving evolution.

Also, individual birds within each population differed significantly in their color preferences, and adult males built more complex bowers than younger males. Diamond observed that because males often stole objects from one another, they had lots of chances to size up their neighbors’ technique and might pick up some tips. Young male great bowerbirds sometimes work collaboratively on a single structure before striking out
on their own, and females may travel in pairs or small groups when sizing up the local talent. In Diamond’s view, the aesthetic taste of bowerbirds, though based on instinct, is partly learned. Which means that bowerbird aesthetics are culturally transmitted, much like human art styles.

So we have people like Denis Dutton arguing that human art is
more
instinctive and others like Jared Diamond saying that bowerbird art is
less
instinctive. Even in art, the perceived gulf between people and animals is being eroded at both ends.

Not that the gap doesn’t exist. Dutton’s theory that art is strictly a survival benefit goes only so far. It may help explain why rich people hang million-dollar canvases in their mansions and why we listen to music in dance clubs, but it’s more difficult to relate Darwinian selection to, say, the illustrations in textbooks or the tunes in your personal playlists. As a type of communication, art may convey many messages besides seduction and status. And bowerbirds are hardly painting Renaissance masterpieces; only humans create representational art of any kind. But the parallels may be deeper than we thought. Given another million years to refine its technique, one can only guess what the bowerbird might come up with.

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IN 1872, A CAPABLE ITALIAN BOTANIST,
Odoardo Beccari, who rubbed shoulders with Charles Darwin once or twice, was exploring a New Guinea jungle when he stumbled across a small hut. “I had just shot a small marsupial as it was running up a tree,” he later reported, “when turning round close to the path, I found myself in front of a piece of workmanship more lovely than the ingenuity of any animal had ever been known to construct. It was a cabin in miniature, in the midst of a miniature meadow, studded with flowers.”