66 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
times people are so busy getting on to the next thing that they don’t
have time to reflect upon their experience, to care about it and to
mark it as special. To make an experience special is to make art.
Dissanayake emphasizes that art is not just the production of
saleable objects but an innate behavior, essential to being human.
Humans universally display a propensity for aesthetic behavior. Until
the Enlightenment there was no art world of critics, dealers, curators,
museums and gallery owners. In ancient societies and in traditional
societies today the role is art for life’s sake not art for art’s sake. The
human behavior of art is deeper than the work of the individual ego,
exhibition or specialist commerce commodity. Art as a behavior is
universal, and creative responding is a biological propensity of human
nature and essential for survival. From Dissanayake’s ethnobiological
perspective, we can’t go on living in a way that denies our inherent art
making and responding behaviors. Art as a living process, centered
around daily life and important human issues, has been the case for
most of human history.
Is the behavior of art unique to humans? Professor of philosophy
and music, David Rothenberg (2011), says that animals (including
humans) have an innate appreciation for beauty and display amazing
arrays of art-making behavior. Rothenberg makes music with birds,
whales and cicadas and chronicles his experiences in books and
recordings. Rothenberg’s work opens us to an even wider sense
of the behavior of art, and to wonder at the world. Many species
sing songs and do dances for more than satisfaction of biological
needs. Rothenberg cites the behavior of the Australian bowerbird
as evidence of the creative process existing millions of years before
the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux. The male bowerbird creates a
bower, an artwork he builds with the hopes of attracting a female.
He always decorates it with something blue: flowers, shells, feathers.
Sometimes he paints parts of it with blue pigment ground up from
fruity pulp. The bowerbird reminds us that creativity is not the sole
province of human beings.