Why Do It?

A couple of posts ago, I looked briefly at what goes on (or rather, doesn't) in the mind of the artist and put it all down to a condition known as cognitive disinhibiton. Perhaps by now, you've decided that you're cognitively disinhibited too and must be absolutely bursting with creative urges. You just can't wait to flick a brush about like one of the Hesperides, scattering stars across the sky, or maybe you're itching to get your hands into a lump of clay and pull it about like a God modeling Adam. We're still left, however, with one fundamental question: Why?

Certainly, many artists are motivated by personal trauma:

Francis Bacon recounted to the poet, Anthony Cronin, that as a child, he was regularly locked up in a cupboard so that his nanny could canoodle with her boyfriend and not be interrupted.

"Confined in the darkness of this cupboard Francis would scream - perhaps for several hours at a time - but since he was out of earshot of the happy courting couple, completely in vain."

"That cupboard," Bacon apparently said years later, "was the making of me."

In an interview with Artforum magazine, timed to coincide with her M O M A retrospective in New York, Louise Bourgeois revealed that the imagery in her sculptures was almost wholly autobiographical, that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, at the age of eleven, that her English governess was also her father’s mistress. Like Bacon, it was a singular event in Bourgeois’ own childhood that inspired her - or should that be ‘haunted’ her? And no, that's not her handbag under her arm.

But what is wrong with these artists? Why can’t they just shut up and get on with their lives like everyone else? Why are they, in Andy Warhol’s words, producing things “that people don't need to have but that [they] – for some reason – think it would be a good idea to give them?”

Let's go back seventeen thousand years to the painted images on the caves at Lascaux in Southern France. These truly magical depictions may at some time have played a part in hunting rites, but the entire system is so carefully sequential that it is thought to evoke the rhythm of the seasons and the regeneration of time. Lascaux may well be homo sapiens' first impulse to depict the origins of the world.

Mating rituals play a significant part in the cycle of images at Lascaux and here we may at last arrive at the real reason behind our urge to create: it's all evolutionary biology.

In his book, the Mating Mind, psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic; a way to impress prospective marriage partners with the quality of one’s brain. Artistic virtuosity, he claims, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake and highly prized.

Miller goes on to give the example of the male bower birds of Australia and New Guinea who fastidiously create and then decorate their bowers with orchids, snail shells, berries and bark. The bowers are purely decorative, bear in mind, and not to be confused with the birds' nests, which are made at a later stage. Some bower birds even paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit which they apply with 'paint brushes' of  leaves and bark. The females then appraise these creations and mate with the makers of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented bowers. Andy Goldsworthy, eat your heart out.

Anyway, I'm convinced. I’ve seen stuff like this in the local art centre, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that every private view I've attended ends in a riot of coupling.

There’s a weaker argument too. Economist Thorstein Veblen, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the writer, Tom Wolfe have all suggested that humans make art simply to impress others.

But let's leave the last word on our urges to Chris Frith, professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. In a recent Guardian podcast about conciousness and the brain, he said:

"We have very little access to what we're doing... but we think we do."