Art seems to stand as a peculiar and bizzare feature of humanity, because it is not necessary. It did not have to be. It is an act of creation, of interference in and addition to nature.
When you attempt to reduce human behavior to simple, biologically deterministic routines scaled up from basic animal routines, there remain many strange artifacts. Most curious of all is that these artifacts don’t seem to serve any clear biological or evolutionary function. And yet they aren’t minor or uncommon or tangential features of humanity, they are essential and common features. And even more strangely, they seem to be built in, with some young people possessing them in great quantities.
Even stranger, considering how much human life has changed, these same instincts, qualities, and abilities are clearly discernible among even the absolute oldest signs of human habitation. And they are evident across all cultures in all environments. They seem to be inherently latent in all of us, to some degree. You can pick any corner of humanity and select a likely individual, transpose them into a radically different culture with no intermediate generational stages or evolution, and train them to levels of exceptional excellence.
It is very hard to see how Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or Cubism are necessary. How they could be nothing more than what you would expect the biologically deterministic products of a materially deterministic universe to produce. It is not clear how genes must necessarily lead to Harry Potter and Beethoven’s 5th, Howl’s Moving Castle and Impressionism. If all we are is the products of our genes, then there must be some very strange stuff in there.
Making Nobody Happy 