People Make Art

Now to tackle the first assumed foundation for our creativity and its outcome, i.e., our works.
People make art.
Let us first briefly compare animal’s creativity and people’s.
Bruce Sterling (1954-) observed people’s creativity is different from how animals show creativity. The enormous creative differences between people and animals are revealed through Sterling’s description, “Man the toolmaker” (Bruce Sterling, "Shaping Things," p. 56).
Sterling targets two key discrepancies in the way humans use creativity from animals: “humans’ innate capacity to shape things” and “humans are better at getting better.”
We can notice the difference between animal and human use of creativity, by looking at how each interacts with tools. Animals utilize whatever basic objects are near, to fulfill the desired purpose, like a long stick to dig out ants and termites from their holes, using a rock to break open a nut, and how birds use grasses, straw, twigs, and man-made twine (or whatever man-made objects capturing their attention) to erect nests. Despite animals’ exhibition of patterns and structure, as in spider’s webs, bird’s nests, beaver’s dams, and various birds’ and animals; mating dances, it seems animals’ creative products are instinctual. Animals’ tools do not show signs of development and refining.
People go beyond using whatever maybe readily available, to refining tools to be better, stronger, faster. A common tool example is the knife. Neolithic people (or even before) picked up sharp edged rocks as a cutting/scraping tool. They honed the rock by chipping away its surface excesses, to refine and sharpen the cutting edge. The smaller rock fragments were shaped into spear heads. Later, the bow and arrow were invented so the hunter would not need to get too close to ferocious animals, and the hunter added a sharpened rock to the arrow’s shaft-point, as the arrow’s head. Metal was found to last longer, resisted breaking and retained its sharpness longer. Stronger metals were discovered, developed, and refined into useful knife shapes. Over time, different size and shape knives were used for farming, hunting, warfare, medical, domestic, and artistic uses.
Dennis Dutton in his book, "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution," (p. 7-9) relayed how chimpanzees in captivity, trainers gave them paint to apply on a white paper, seemed to enjoy the way the colors disrupted the white of the paper, which he described as “disruption”. If the trainer did not stop the chimpanzee at an aesthetically pleasing point, they would continue until the “picture” became a muddy mess. Once they quit, they showed no interest in it.

Dennis Dutton observed chimpanzees do not exhibit aesthetic comprehension with their products. Aesthetic understanding is a human characteristic; it compels us to refine actions and products, in contrast to whatever fulfills the required task. In other words, human creativity includes aesthetic awareness and judgment. In essence, animals do not make art.
A person channels their creative impulses through the ideas in their head, shaping and developing the idea through some medium where it is realized in the physical world and shared with an audience. The idea filters through a maker’s personality, education, belief systems, into the medium they will work in, with the result, being a product, they present to an audience. Artists presents views of life, love, the universe, eternity and anything else in mind, giving us a wide range of positive or negative experiences.
Why would someone be creative? Most artists cannot help it, it is an internal need; they must create. Producing is not only an activity, but part of their being.
It has been well documented that during most people’s school years (ages 6-18), creativity diminishes. School systems want students to conform to the same pattern. This system produces compliant workers and a conforming populace. The public usually live a life in the shallows of life, without being zealously devoted to something; when society encounters creative people presenting their passions, confusion arises, and it may take time before works sink in. Consequently, as artists interact with audiences, they must develop a thick skin, to withstand the public’s bewilderment, misinterpretations, and plain apathy, including a critic’s critical criticisms. The creative path is not for the weak-of-heart.
Artists create out of their being and use artistic knowledge, understanding their materials and mediums, recognizing a work’s impact on audiences, choosing how a work is shaped, until completion. We can assume artists believe their work the most difficult and interesting art being made because they are conceiving out of their soul; if they do not believe this, they will not spend a lifetime disciplining themselves, refining skills, presenting the results.
With the development of Artificial Intelligence programs, this is a topic that is again asked in society. Are the Music and Visual images made by these programs, Art?
At this point, the computer-generated products mirror the animal’s products mentioned above; there is not any aesthetic comprehension by the programs. Audiences are not guided through works, emotionally and intellectually. The works are only surface depictions, or the comedy term is a “one liner” or it is like a bullseye. Until the program can engage an audience more deeply, in a long-term way, where the audience will return to the work, again and again, we cannot label the works as Art. I personally doubt this will happen, but we will see.