Art Instinct

My boyfriend and I are in an infinite snowball fight. One time I got him in glass art. A couple of days ago, I was just standing in the lunchroom minding my business when I felt something hard hit my back. I didn't really know what was going on. Then I turned around and Luke was standing there, and there was a puddle of snow behind me. I bet he'd call that sweet revenge, but he should watch his back.


Today in Spanish Conversation and Composition class, I recited this poem in front of the class:

Si yo comiera muchos cocos,
muchos cocos compraria.
Pero como pocos cocos como,
pocos cocos compro.

My teacher gave me a sticker that said "Muy Bien". I thought it was pretty cool of her.


Later in the day, I got a text that said this:
"Joe dumped the rest of the grapes on the ground so we could hit em with the hockey sticks then we started hitting the grapes at eachother but then we ran out of grapes...so we used apples. Then joe accidentally stuck his thumb in the bruise in the apple and it was all warm and soft and gooey and he screamed like a little bitch then i was laughing so hard i had to sit down on this white table and then the table collapsed and i went crashing to the ground."


Anyway.

Recently, I've been reading this book called "The Art Instinct". It's basically an art philosophy book. Author Denis Dutton explains that our instinctual love for viewing and creating art is an innate piece of human psychology, something inside of us that gives us pleasure and understanding. Painting, literature, music, theater etc. can be appreciated cross-culturally, in addition to its ability to withstand the test of time. As Dutton explains, “’the same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome town thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London.’” This proves how art is in fact a universal trait and an important part of human nature.

"'But like dreams, and unlike other forms of conscious conceptual order—science, philosophy, scholarship—literature taps directly into the elemental response systems activated by emotion. Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral.’”

This quote is especially interesting to me because it describes how reading and dreams are similar. Both use parts of the imagination, namely because when we read we are creating a mental image in our head, but it also uses thematic and emotional responses to achieve pleasure. By deeming dreams and art very similar, it shows us that art is one of the most primitive and strictly human functions of our brain, just like dreams.