RE: Durkheim redux

From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 19 Apr 2005 - 12:59:53 GMT

  • Next message: Vincent Campbell: "RE: Durkheim redux"

    Just dipping into the flow here and happened upon this comment about animal art.

    I saw a book once- in an otherwise reputable bookshop- that was entirely about cat art, in other words art by cats...

    Can't remember the title though.

    Also saw a piece on the local TV news the other day about some kind of primate (a monkey, not an ape) that appeared to like to draw on paper- film showed it making marks on the paper whilst others of it's group just tried to eat the paper.

    A few years ago, I think I recall seeing a programme about those bonobos they taught to sign, and some of them painted too- although i believe their painting was interpreted of being of the movement of objects, rather than objects themselves (e.g. lots of zig zags for a ball bouncing) all a bit dubious perhaps...

    Do any animals categorically make aesthetic representations, aside from physical performances, like humans do? Bower birds perhaps?

    Is this a root to memes- the capacity to abstract an idea into a representational form in another medium (cave art, stone tool, piece of modern art, whatever...)?

    Off the topic a bit I'm sure.

    Vincent

    > ----------
    > From: Derek Gatherer
    > Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    > Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 8:54 AM
    > To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    > Subject: Re: Durkheim redux
    >
    > At 02:47 15/04/2005, you wrote:
    > > > IIRC, a painting by a mule won a prize in a modern
    > > > art exhibition in
    > > > Paris early in the 20th century. ;-)
    >
    > I think that's an urban myth.
    >
    >
    > ===============================================================
    > This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
    > Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
    > For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
    > see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
    >
    >

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue 19 Apr 2005 - 14:07:19 GMT