Re: How art invented humanity

At Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:52:45 -0000 (UTC), Tara <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys
> into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern
> France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural
> chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls,
> almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the
> Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the
> paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. Today, the images are believed
> to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of
> human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia,
> Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more
> than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
> Cave painting of prehistoric animals in earthy tones on a textured rock
> surface.
> 
> These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented
> art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such
> questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in
> the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might
> reveal to us about the nature of reality.
> 
> Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few
> years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ –
> art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common
> interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to
> our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his
> contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal
> story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art.
> Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity..........
> 
> Art has never been a celebration of humanity, but always an exploration of
> those borderlands where the human ends and something else begins. This applies
> even to art dealing with seemingly human ideas, feelings and things. Only
> through art can a city become a jungle, a house an alien structure, a sadness
> a kind of weather event....................
> 
> https://aeon.co/essays/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=48f001c5bc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_07_24_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-49ad69cbc2-71577312

Which brings to mind a question I've seen before...

Which came first:  music, or speech?

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