Thought-provoking article. When the cave painters were at work, they most probably didn’t see themselves as “artists” and of course not scientists, philosophers. That was an age where all those things were together at once, living in a religious state, I think. Little by little, they separated (to sometimes unhappy results). Brings to mind the old myth where humans were both male and female originally, but gods, fearing their power, separated them, leading us to look for our half. Same with art and science, I think.

So while Picasso is perhaps right to say “We have invented nothing “ as quoted in the article when he means art is as old as humans, the realization that something is art, is perhaps invented afterwards.

I also reject the two kinds of art thesis that’s proposed here:

“It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live. … Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art”

Many current artists would lump, say, paintings by Old Masters into this category. Facing the statue of David past month in Florence, it was eye opening how much such a classic statue of a human can move people!

I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth.

We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.

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Well this is fun, it is deliberately provocative but maybe not dumb. The title itself is something a literalist engineer (myself) would reject, but is about the development of thought that is reflective, self referential. That’s an interesting train of thought.

So I looked at the author and found: Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice https://www.reclaimingart.com/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-a...

Not sure if I agree but interesting nonetheless.