Visual art: The replicable unit

I remember once, in the dark of night, wrestling with the idea of  the transmission of ideas, which everyone seems to talk about and accept. However, truth to tell, can ideas be transmitted? Do they leap with abandon - or caution - from head to head? Do we all share a great consciousness from which we draw ideas in the dark of night or light of day? Did our mothers lower their foreheads to ours, when we were wee children sitting on their laps, so we could absorb their thoughts?

I thought not. Now that that issue is settled, a second and related issue is persistence, not only transmission from one individual to another, but from one generation of kin to the next. I assume the transmission, for a great many years - millenia - was between kin because our ancestors lived in small groups of kin. Although we may see little cultural persistence these days, it certainly was characteristic of the past. 

To quote M. G. Houston (1920: 2), “we are confronted with an extraordinary conservation or persistence of style, not only through the centuries, but through millenniums [sic].”  Boas (1955: 144, 169) referred to this continuity in style as “fixed type” or “fixity” of design and form. Despite Alexander’s lament that he is “not optimistic about the usefulness of searches for unalterable or ‘basic’ human social behaviors as a method for solving our problems” (1987: 9), the millennia that traditions have lasted suggest that humans often had fairly stable social strategies.

So, I have argued that the replicable unit, a unit that persisted across vast swaths of time, was the use of color, pattern, and or form used solely to attract attention to a body, object or message. Art is not a meme, if a meme is an idea. Art is a behavior - painting, sculpting, dancing singing, making music.... 

A third related question is does visual art have a function? Replication, particularly across generations, seems to imply a function. Don't we tend to copy things we observe that "work" - that have an effect we want to create? 

Many scholars, some quite famous, do argue that art - any of the arts, has no function, that art merely exists or that it "exists for its own sake." One implication of Darwin’s theory is that behaviors we now regard as characteristic of our species, and that would include visual art, persisted precisely because they did have a function. As art is a universal and ancient cultural behavior, which has persisted despite costs that can be quite high, it quite possibly is an adaptation that, at least in the past, must have been important to humans.  As an aside, the cost of art involved not only learning the techniques and perfecting them, to the degree necessary, but also the actual time spend in the application of color or the modification of form. It also included the time spent acquiring the necessary resources, which could be quite arduous and which could involve facing danger. It is said that the Australians had to cross into enemy territory to get the pigments they needed.  

So, next time I will continue talking about art and make suggestions regarding its many functions. I really don't know why I am, after a hiatus of so many years, decades even, talking about art. For a long time it seemed that life held so many other challenges that needed to be addressed.