When and Why Did Art Begin?

When Did Art Begin?

When and why did art begin? Let's start with the "when" question. A good guess is that art began when the first humans were born with an opposing thumb to their hand. No originating date like the first Tuesday 300,000 years ago marks this birthday. But evidence shows that art-making must be hundreds of millennia old.

imagined illustration of artist in prehistory

Just as we remain uncertain of who the first humans were who poked their fingers into mud or ash in order to draw or sculpt, we don't know what first things they made or why they made them. Different from making tools or utensils for functional use, why did humans create apparently non-functional drawings and sculptures? 

That these first art creations were non-functional doesn't mean they were non-meaningful. Quite the contrary, they must have had great significance for those who crept into deep and dark caves to find just the right spots for their depictions. Or for those who sought out and carried special figurines close to themselves wherever they travelled.

Venus of Berekhat Ram, 230,000-500,000 BCE (internet photo)

Art made by the earliest human beings has endured for several millennia. Examples of what we've come to call fertility icons, "earth-goddess" or "Venus" figurines date back an amazing 500 millennia. This is based on material products that have endured to our time. Then again, think of the lost legacy of all the art that has not endured, painted onto eroded rocks or into shifting sands! Who knows when those erased works were first created.

Art as the Greatest Human Invention of All

Anthropologists tell us that the ability to make and use tools is one of the prime definitions of "humankind", as distinct from other "kinds" on the planet. We know that other primates use tools, as do other animals. Nevertheless, the technological reach of tool-making and its applications has remained singular among humans.

Despite this triumph of tool-making, a  National Geographic article reports (along with gorgeous photographs) that "the greatest innovation in the history of humankind was neither the stone tool nor the steel sword, but the invention of symbolic expression by the first artists." (January, 2015, p. 33). Art marks the invention of invention! (see alsoThe Greatest Innovation in History)

Art is a Defining Feature of Being Human

DaVinci drawing: man and architectural proportions

Art is a defining feature of being human. We are homo aestheticus or art-makers and art appreciators. This aesthetic purpose takes on an entirely different emphasis than functionality. Tools are, by definition, concrete and functional. Art need not be. DaVinci, one of the greatest artists of all time, is famous also for the vast scope of his creative achievements: his aesthetic innovations in painting as well as his wide-ranging scientific explorations, machine inventions, and innovations in architecture and mathematics. Art and creativity are soulmates.

Although tools can be beautifully and elegantly crafted, their reason for being is to be useful. They serve to get us something we need or want: like a stick poked into water catches us a fish for supper. What does a stick poked into mud or ashes and then dabbed as a design onto a rock get us? 

Art needn't serve such concrete, material functions as do tools. Yet, for eons of pre-written history, humans have been impelled to create art, even under the most hazardous of conditions. Interestingly, many creation myths across the globe have a divine creator artfully making humans out of some earthy material like mud or clay, then breathing or speaking life into it. Quite an analogy for the act of artistic creation!

Why Make Art?

Why did the first humans make art? We can only speculate about the reasons. The question continues to intrigue us and applies to contemporary art-making as well. Why do we make art now? What we do know is that art is a fundamental human experience, both the making and the experiencing of it. 

The first sentence in S. Giedion's illustrated volume The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art, tackles the question posed. Can we infer answers to why we make art from the earliest experiences of our prehistoric ancestors ? He suggests we can try by attending to the content of the work, what is most emphasized,  and its manner of presentation in its context (for example, the innermost parts of caves). 

With us from the dawn of our consciousness, art can register human experience and do more. It is useful, not in the same way that  tools and utensils are useful. Yet art serves meaningful and significant functions. Art contributes to making or marking a sense of specialness in the world, focusing on what is needed or sought, commemorating or imploring significant objects or events. Also, in the way visual language is useful, art is a means of communicating with others, even with some transcendent or spiritual "other".

Wild Things by Janet Strayer

Art expresses in symbol, visual metaphor, or expressive marks what we experience, need, want, fear, or yearn for ... be it material and physical or immaterial and metaphysical.

Art is also an act of exploring our minds, creating and re-creating experiences, dreams, wishes, or worlds that others, too, can experience. It is an act of exploring our powers to create, elevating or submerging us into what we do not quite know ... but somehow begin to imagine. In the process of dedicated art-making, this not-quite-knowing begins to take shape and form. And so, art itself makes meaning.