Niche construction theory and the evolution of visual arts. Towards a new evolutionary dynamics of artistic behaviour

Start - End 
2014 - 2014 (completed)
Other institution(s) 
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Klosterneuburg, Vienna)

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Abstract

The evolutionary study of art is an upcoming area of research that has drawn that attention of scholars in humanities disciplines such as art history and archaeology, as well as in fields that are already accustomed to evolutionary and cognitive thought, such as psychology and anthropology. Most research is currently undertaken from an evolutionary psychological perspective, which includes a set of theoretical and conceptual premises on e.g. the selective pressures at work, the relative roles of biology, culture and the environment, a strong focus on internal, psychological mechanisms, and an overall, although not exclusive, emphasis on adaptation through natural selection. While recent years have seen the rise of perspectives such as gene-culture co-evolution in the study of art, a great number of issues remain to be addressed, warranting the integration of other, less prevalent theoretical approaches such as cultural niche construction theory. Additionally, evolutionary thinking on art is currently largely detached from the archaeological record, which is particularly striking in the context of visual arts, being the primary, though not sole art form to leave historical traces as correlates of ancestral behaviour. This project undertakes a reassessment of present evolutionary theories of art’s emergence by integrating theory and archaeology, a path already embarked upon by researchers in Darwinian archaeology. Theoretically, it explores less prevalent evolutionary perspectives that also break down traditional conceptual boundaries, making way for a reinvestigation of art as the product of a constant interplay between biology, culture and the environment, in a more profound way than has until now been proposed from the perspective of e.g. gene-culture co-evolution. Specifically, the present project will use cultural niche construction theory and concepts such as the extended mind and epistemic artefacts, with the aim of achieving a newly understood evolutionary dynamics of the emergence of art, in close association with the archaeological record.

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