To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. \”These perations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,\” she said in an interview. \”And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.\” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.

Speaking of Artvolution, I looked up the etymology of the word \”art\” this evening. Turns out it derives from the same pre-indo-european root that \”arm\” does and evolved over the years from a simple meaning of \”fit together, join.\” The terminology of join makes me wonder if it didn’t evolve from some sexual/reproductive concept.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 19:48.