The only way to understand and resolve the perplexing contradictions, inadequacies, and confusions of both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics is, I believe, by placing art in the broadest possible perspective: we must recognize that art is a universal need and propensity of the human species that post-traditional society by its very nature must deny.
It is significant that "art" acquired its modern meaning as something set apart at the same time that the arts themselves were being practiced and appreciated by fewer and fewer members of society. In small-scale, unspecialized, premodern societies, individuals can make and do everything that is needed for their livelihood. Such societies may not possess the abstract concept "art," but they offer all their members frequent opportunities to be "artists": by decorating their bodies and possessions, dancing, singing, versifying, performing.
Certainly, some persons in traditional societies are acknowledged as being more talented or skillful than others, but the special talents of the few do not preclude art making by the many. In these technologically simpler societies, as I described, the arts are invariably and inseparably part of ritual ceremonies that articulate, express, and reinforce a group's deepest beliefs and concerns. As the vehicle for group meaning and a galvanizer of group one-heartedness, art-conjoined-with-ritual is essential to group survival; in traditional societies "art for life's sake," not "art for art's sake," is the rule.
In our own highly specialized society, of course, the arts themselves have become specialties and do exist for their own sake apart from ritual or any other "ulterior" purpose. This separation, peculiar only to modernized or "advanced" societies, has made art a capital-P Problem. Art's heritage of specialization and its recent self-proclaimed irrelevance permits it to be dismissed by governmental budget-makers as a "frill." Art's traditional aura of sanctity and its association with the privileged class serves both to make it a highly desirable commodity for some members of society and the target of the bitter criticism of others. Thus art is simultaneously sanctified and dismissed as rubbish, becomes the subject of complex exegesis and is totally ignored, commands millions in the auctioneer's salon and yet is irrelevant to most people's lives.
To understand what art is, or again might become, we must look beyond that one-ninth span of human history (or, if we consider only history since the Renaissance, a one-eightieth span) for evidence of aesthetic proclivities in Homo sapiens before they learned to read and write. If we look at preliterate societies today and at young children in all societies, and combine information from these findings with what we can infer from Paleolithic artifacts, we will discover that art is both more protean and more simple than today's theorists would have it.
They, and we, commonly assume that art is concerned with images or texts—representations. But this "literate" approach takes for granted that art is objects—things, like words are things. Let us instead look at art as kinds of behavior, ways of doing things, including, but not confined to, visual or literary representation. When we look beyond the restricted case of modern, Western, and Western-influenced societies, when we expand our vision to include all examples of societies, past and present, we discover that people do a number of things that are artlike, congruent with what we think of as "art": they explore, they play, they shape and embellish, they formalize or make order. These ways of doing are inherent in human activity: they come naturally to us without being taught.
Regarding art as a behavior—an instance of "making special"—shifts the emphasis from the modernist's view of art as object or quality or the postmodernists view of it as text or commodity to the activity itself (the making or doing and appreciating), which is what it is in many premodern societies where the object is essentially an occasion for or an accourement to ceremonial participation.
"Making special" is a fundamental human proclivity or need. We cook special meals and wear special garb for important occasions. We find special ways of saying important things. Ritual and ceremony are occasions during which everyday life is shaped and embellished to become more than ordinary. What modern artists do, in their specialized and often driven way, is an exaggeration, an extension of what ordinary people also do, naturally and with enjoyment. Looked at in this way, art, the activity of making the things one cares about special, is fundamental to everyone and, as in traditional societies, deserves to be acknowledged as normal. And normal, socially valuable activities should be encouraged and developed.
Making important things special was a fundamental and integral part of human behavior for thousands of years before writing looked at its results and called them "art" or "texts." Writing told the explorers, players, shapers, and embellishers that they were making objects detached from reality, texts to be read and analyzed, self-consciously abstracted from their contexts. But until the present century, these explorers, players, shapers, and embellishers did not pay much attention, particularly to the more abstruse and esoteric implications of these literate pronouncements. Most artists until the present century did not care a whole lot about the words that their works provoked.
Textbooks tell us that the romantic nineteenth century was preoccupied with the artist or author; that the modernist twentieth century was preoccupied with the work or text; and that contemporary postmodernism is preoccupied with the critic/reader. It may be time now to turn from these to the human "reality" as expressed in species nature; that is, to perennial human needs, aspirations, constraints, limitations, achievements that along with "art" have been veiled, distorted, atrophied, or erased by the excesses of modern literate life.
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