Firstly, as Oscar Wilde said, 'All art is quite useless. The implicit meaning a biologist sees behind this quip is that art is non-utilitarian in a narrow sense employed within the fields of animal behaviour and evolutionary biology. That is, human art does not help us to survive or to pass on our genes, which are the readily discernible functions of most animal behaviour. Of course, most human art is utilitarian in the broader sense that the artist thereby communicates something to fellow humans, but transmitting one's thoughts to the next generation is not the same thing as transmitting one's genes. In contrast, bird-song serves the obvious functions of wooing a mate, defending a territory, and thereby transmitting genes.
Regarding the second claim that human art is instead motivated by aesthetic pleasure, Webster's dictionary defines art as 'the making or doing of things that have form or beauty'. While we cannot ask mockingbirds and nightingales if they similarly enjoy the form or beauty of their songs, it is suspicious that they sing mainly during the breeding season. Hence they are probably not singing just for aesthetic pleasure. As for human art's third claimed distinction, each human group has a distinctive art style, and the knowledge of how to make and enjoy that particular style is learned, not inherited. For example, it is easy to distinguish typical songs being sung today in Tokyo and in Paris. But those stylistic differences are not hard-wired in our genes, as are the differences, say, in the eyes of Parisians and Japanese. Parisians and Japanese can and often do visit each other's cities and learn each other's songs. In contrast, many species of birds (the so-called nonpasserine birds) inherit the knowledge of how to produce and respond to the particular song of their species. Each of those birds would produce the right song even if it had never heard it, and even if it had heard only the songs of other species. It is as if a French baby adopted by Japanese parents, flown in infancy to Tokyo, and educated there began spontaneously to sing the 'Marseillaise'.
At this point, we may seem to be light-years removed from elephant art. Elephants are not even closely related to us evolutionarily. Much more relevant to us are the artworks that were produced by two captive chimpan/ees named Congo and Betsy, a gorilla called Sophie, an orangutan named Alexander, and a monkey named Pablo. These primates variously mastered the media of brush or finger-painting and pencil, chalk, or crayon drawing. Congo did up to thirty-three paintings in one day, apparently for his own satisfaction, as he did not show his work to other chimps and threw a tantrum when his pencil was taken away. For human artists, the ultimate proof of success is a one-man show, but Congo and Betsy were honoured by a two-chimp show of their paintings in 1957 at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. The following year, Congo had a one-chimp show at London's Royal Festival Hall. What is more, almost all of the paintings on exhibit at those chimp shows sold (to human buyers); plenty of human artists cannot make that boast. Still other ape paintings were surreptitiously entered into exhibits by human artists and were enthusiastically acclaimed by unsuspecting art critics for their dynamism, rhythm, and sense of balance. Equally unsuspecting were child psychologists who were given paintings by chimps from the Baltimore Zoo and were asked to diagnose the painters' problems. The psychologists guessed that a painting by a three-year-old male chirnp was instead by an aggressive seven- or eight-year-old boy with paranoid tendencies. Two paintings by the same one-year-old female chimp were attributed to different ten-year-old girls, one painting indicating a belligerent girl of the schizoid type, the other a paranoid girl with strong father identification. It is a tribute to the psychologists' insight that they intuited the artist's sex correctly in each case; they were only wrong about the artist's species.
These paintings by our closest relatives do start to blur the distinction between human art and animal activities. Like human paintings, the ape paintings served no narrow utilitarian function of transmitting genes, and were instead just produced for satisfaction. One could object that the ape artists, like the elephant Siri, made their pictures just for their own satisfaction, while most human artists aim to communicate to other nans. The apes did not even keep their paintings to enjoy themselves simply discarded them. Yet that objection does not strike me as fatal, e the simplest human art (doodling) is also regularly discarded, and since one of the best pieces of art I own is a wood statue carved by a New Guinea villager who discarded it under his house after carving it. Even some human art that later became famous was created by artists for their private satisfaction: the composer Charles Ives published little of his music, and Franz Kafka not only did not publish his three great novels but even forbade his executor to do so. (Fortunately, the executor disobeyed, thereby forcing Kafka's novels to take on a communicative function posthumously.)
However, there is a more serious objection against claiming a parallel between ape art and human art. Ape painting is just an unnatural activity of captive animals. One might insist that, since it is not natural behaviour, it could not illuminate the animal origins of art. Let us therefore turn now to some undeniably natural and illuminating behaviour: bowerbirds' building of bowers, the most elaborate structures built and decorated by any animal species other than humans. If I had not already heard of bowers, I would have mistaken the first one I saw for something man-made, as did nineteenth-century explorers in New Guinea. I had set out that morning from a New Guinea village, with its circular-huts, neat rows of flowers, people wearing decorative beads, and little bows and arrows carried by children in imitation of their fathers' larger ones. Suddenly, in the jungle, I came across a beautifully woven, circular hut 8 feet in diameter and 4,feet high, with a doorway large enough for a child to enter and sit inside. In front of the hut was a lawn of green moss, clean of debris except for hundreds of natural objects of various colours that had obviously been placed there intentionally as decorations. They mainly consisted of flowers and fruits and leaves, but also some butterfly wings and fungi. Objects of similar colour were grouped together, such as red fruits next to a group of red leaves. The largest decorations were a tall pile of black fungi facing the door, with another pile of orange fungi a few yards further from the door. All blue objects were grouped inside the hut, red ones outside, and yellow, purple, black, and a few green ones in other locations.
That hut was not a child's playground. It had instead been built and decorated by an otherwise unimpressive jay-sized bird called a bower-bird, a member of a family of eighteen species confined to New Guinea and Australia. Bowers are erected by males for the sole purpose of seducing females, who then bear the sole responsibility for building the nest and rearing the young. Males are polygamous, try to mate with as many females as possible, and provide the female with nothing except sperm. Females, often in groups, cruise around the bowers and inspect all the ones in the vicinity before selecting one at which to mate. Human equivalents of such scenes are played out every night on Sunset Strip, a few miles from my home in Los Angeles. Female bowerbirds select their bedmate by the quality of his bower, its number of decorations, and its conformity to local rules, which vary among species and populations of bowerbirds. Some populations prefer blue decorations, others red or green or grey, while some replace the hut with one or two towers, or a two-walled avenue, or a four-walled box. There are populations that paint their bowers with crushed leaves or else with oils that they excrete. These local differences in rules appear not to be hard-wired into the birds' genes. Instead, they are learned through younger birds observing older birds during the many years that it takes a bowerbird to reach adulthood. Males learn the locally correct way to decorate, while females learn those same rules for the purpose of choosing a male.