Book Review: Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began
Posted: January 21, 2008
Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began by Ellen Dissanayake was published in 2000, and, like Constant Battles reviewed below, I can only wish I had come across it earlier. It is an amazing and wondrous book. It is repetitious but the points it makes are so important and difficult for our modern minds to grasp that I, for one, am thankful for its redundancies.
If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the human drive to bond (dB) in mutually caring relationships, they only have to read the first two chapters, Mutuality and Belonging. She makes the process of bonding come alive in her descriptions and pictures of the emotion-laden exchanges between mothers and their infants throughout the world.
If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the drive of humans to comprehend (dC) and learn how to make sense of the world, they only have to read Chapter 3, Finding and Making Meaning. As the book’s title indicates, it emphasizes art as a mode for making meaning, but it does not belittle religion and science as other modes.
Chapter 4, ‘Hands-on’ Competence, puts a fresh perspective on the drive to acquire (dD). It humanizes this drive as a search for a sense of competence in our dealing with the essentials of the material world with respect, as well as with skill. It shows how the industrial/informational revolutions have distorted and diminished our sense of this competence. The only fault I have with this point is that the author understates, I believe, the potential for people to build a sense of competence from mastering complex machinery, including computers.
The book’s last two chapters unify its message around art by showing how all art forms have served to evoke and increase our sensibilities to our most basic human emotions by Elaborating (the title of Chapter 5) art objects to help humans take seriously the fundamentals of human existence. It’s contribution in this regard will enable me to rewrite the portions of Chapter 9 of Being Human that cover the contributions of the arts to making meaning. I have always felt that this part of the RD theory was inadequately expressed.
I am tempted to quote many parts of this remarkable book but I will limit myself to its last paragraph that is, surprisingly, a quotation from another person.
Tags: Book Review, Drive to Comprehend, Drive to Bond, Drive to Defend | 0 Comments »I cannot do better than to end this chapter with some impassioned words from Robert Hughes, which come from a quite different approach to the arts but echo uncannily the message of this book:
One of the ways you measure the character—indeed, the greatness—of a country is by its public commitment to the arts. Not as a luxury; not as a diplomatic device; not as a social placebo. But as a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature, without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished, and denied, and our sense of community with other citizens is weakened. This may sound like rhetoric, but after twenty-six hears of writing in America I know it to be true—I know it in my heart, my sometimes mean and irritable writer’s heart. The arts are the field on which we place our own dreams, thoughts, and desires alongside those of others, so that solitudes can meet, to their joy sometimes, or to their surprise, and sometimes to their disgust. When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.
Back to the blog
Back to my site