Are Works of Art in the mind?

Question

Where do you suppose a Martian visitor might find a work of art on earth?

Answer 1

Art is a type of communication. Unlike prose and other simpler recording mechanisms, the point of art is usually to provoke an emotional response in the audience. Because emotional experiences are so varied and often in response to a variety of non-emotional physical datum, art itself is equally varied. Some is accessible, some obscure, and most art is of relative and subjective value, depending of course, on its specific evocative capability.

Because most humans are constantly emotional, almost any material might be viewed as a form of art, depending only on its presentation, environment, and the audience. Thus you can see instances of 'junk art', 'performance art', and a number of other oddities. Even unaltered nature can be a kind of art, if the viewer gets a message from it.

Manifestations of alien art would seem to depend a lot on the alien involved.

First of all, there is the question of sensory information - even Terrestrial life often has very different capabilities. Dogs can smell thousands of times better than humans, sharks can detect electromagnetic fields, and snakes can whiff in heat variations with pits on their nose. It's not hard to imagine whole art forms based on these media that would be all but imperceptible to humans. Who knows? Maybe whales beach themselves because they're trying to get a closer look at our 'subsonic art'!

And then there are the minds involved. Attaching meaning to things definitely is a function of the mind. We've been trying to teach computers to do that kind of thing since they were first built, and they still don't do so well at it. I think there are enough positive examples to be able to say that many animals are able to appreciate art, at least in some limited ways. Since different people attach different meanings to the same works, though, I'm sure different species are even more varied!

Some forms of logic and reasoning, however, almost have to be universal. So I suspect the greater variation you're going to see in alien art lies in the sensory. We'll just have to wait and see!