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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

“Only humans produce ecstatic art”

I guess they have never heard of the bowerbird: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eptuty/b...

the argument is that the bowerbird isn't making ecstatic art though, in the sense that while the bird is still expressing an aesthetically driven directive, its still biologically motivated, which then remains unexamined beyond preference and aversion in its audience (ie potential mate)

the argument the author is instead trying to make is that humans are the only organism that produces ecstatic aesthetic experiences, not simply that it is the only organism that can make pretty things.

Explain how someone like Picasso is not making art to get laid please, or has nothing to do with his biology

Or maybe simply he miss one poin: all the rest of universe -is- art.

Although in recent times humanity has often wrongly placed and considered itself separate from nature, and in practice, with disastrous results, acts as such, since its origins, humanity has lived in continuity with nature, as do other species, and its activities have reflected this condition, in which practice, knowledge, learning, and the arts were all part of a whole that contributed to life. In this sense, life possessed the quality of art, just as nature still possesses this artistic quality, a non-duality between form and meaning, between necessity and possibility, in an original, artistic, fundamental state.

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