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Early Rock Art of the American West

The Geometric Enigma

By Ekkehart Malotki. Ellen Dissanayake

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

The earliest rock art - in the Americas as elsewhere - is geometric or abstract. Until Early Rock Art in the American West, however, no book-length study has been devoted to...

Art and Intimacy

How the Arts Began

By Ellen Dissanayake

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for...

Homo Aestheticus

Where Art Comes From and Why

By Ellen Dissanayake

“Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of...

What Is Art For?

By Ellen Dissanayake

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called “art,” and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand...