CAT 2026 Slot 3 VARC Q23: Artmaking and Human Cognition

Humans today make art. Think beyond all the qualifications that might trail after this bald statement: that only certain humans make art, that extensive training is involved, that many societies distinguish artistic specialists from nonartists, that in today’s societies most view art rather than making it, and so forth. These qualifications, whatever their local merit, are moot in the face of the overarching truth that making art, considered from a cognitive and psychological vantage, is the province of all those who perceive and experience what is made. We are, almost all of us, artists — everyone who can respond (not necessarily create) to a visual pattern, who can recognize a repeated motif (not necessarily draw it), who can distinguish one medium or one style from another. I will often use an antique word, recently revived, to name this broader artistic experience. Humans are artmaking creatures. . . .

The set of capacities that enables artmaking is a principal marker of modern humanity. There is nothing polemical in this assertion except a certain insistence, which will figure often in what follows, that artmaking be included in our thinking about fundamental human commonalities. Capacities involved in artmaking are many and take shape in complicated ways, arising from innate dispositions . . . Most of these capacities overlap with nonartistic ones, though a few may be distinct and dedicated to artistic perception and production. In the area of overlap, linguistic capacities seem to be particularly important, and humans are (in principle) language-makers in addition to art-makers — speaking creatures as well as artmaking ones.

Humans are symbol-makers too, a feature tightly bound up with language, not so tightly with art. The species Cassirer dubbed Homo symbolicus cannot help but tangle artmaking in webs of symbolic thought and expression, habitually making it a component of behavioral complexes that form such expression. But in fundamental features artmaking is neither language-like nor symbol-like, and from these differences come many clues to its ancient emergence.

If artmaking is a primary, shared trait of modern humans, then to describe its emergence must be to detail the coalescing of that modernity. This took place, archaeologists are clear, over a very long durée: at least 60,000 years or so, more likely something closer to 210,000, depending in part on what that coalescence is taken to comprise. If we look back 25,000 years, a small portion of this long period, we reach the lives of humans whose artistic capacities were probably little different from our own. As we look farther back we reach horizons where this similarity can no longer hold — perhaps 45,000 years ago, perhaps 75,000, perhaps 110,000. But we never cross a line before which all the cognitive capacities recruited in modern artmaking abruptly disappear. Unless we embrace the incredible notion that art sprang forth in full-blown glory, its emergence will have to be tracked in gradualist terms across a long period.

This is one general feature of a history of art’s emergence . . . The history was at once sociocultural and biological . . . The capacities recruited in artmaking are many, so describing its emergence involves following several or many separate strands.