How Animals Perceive Aesthetics
I think most of people believe that aesthetic experiences and artistic expression are unique to humans. Looking for an explanation of how we’ve managed to dominate all other species and overcome nature, we often point to the things we think make us unique—art is easy to point to as a distinguishing characteristic. But in the first week of researching this topic I discovered the bowerbird, a clear example of an animal creating an aesthetic space—they’re not collecting things to merely to attract a mate to a nest; the bower they create are just a stage to show off what they’ve collected.
Similarly, male white-spotted pufferfish create intricate geometric shapes into sand using their belly and fins. They make them to attract females, and they must maintain them constantly as the water pushes the sand—they even take care to push “higher quality”/finer sand into their circle.
So even though it’s obvious animals have a sense of aesthetics, people seem to write it off as wholly instinctual, only driven by a desire to attract a mate, whereas humans may experience aesthetics intellectually or even spiritually.
Every species has a different experience, not just us. We are as unique from the rest of the species as any other single one is. Dogs probably experience a far more intense and pleasurable sense of smell than humans do; birds and mantis shrimp likewise experience color more intensely. These are aesthetic traits that humans cannot comprehend in the same way animals cannot comprehend why we hold the Mona Lisa in such high regard.
Richard Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty has been very helpful as I research how I should approach animal aesthetics & design.
“The evolution of limbs, eyes, and feathers is an important subject in evolutionary biology. … But the mechanical sounds of manakins are distinct from all of these evolutionary novelties because they are aesthetic innovations that have evolved by mate choice.”
So even though it may seem animals are creating art only as a means to get a date, even if that is true, the (female) viewer must become a judge of such art. They pick their mates based on the beauty of the male, but also their craftsmanship. It’s in a female’s best interest to choose the best mate, with how much effort it is for them to reproduce as opposed to males, but there’s not really a reason for them to pick the male based on the best art—the pufferfish circle, bower, and as Prum says, mechanical sounds, realistically have no impact on survivability of their offspring. So, animals must be capable of judging art on its own merit—and birds have been exemplary of this.
My conclusion to everything I’ve said so far has been already said in a study observing birds interacting with paintings:
Studies of visual cognition have shown that birds have highly developed visual cognition (Cook 2000), and the present study suggest that birds may use cognitive abilities to process complex visual stimuli that have no biological meaning such as paintings. Paintings are made by humans for humans; most humans have the cognitive sophistication to appreciate them.
Birds and other animals probably have the capacity to appreciate art, just not so much art we make. My aim in my work therefore is to try and find ways to bridge the gap between what humans find aesthetically pleasing and what animals find appealing, creating objects for (mostly) domesticated animals. I’m very fond of and interested in making objects for small pets like guinea pigs and rabbits, though I’m not sure I’ll commit to that since I’m still in the research process.
