Do Animals Make Art?

Art is difficult to describe. Even humans can’t seem to agree on what constitutes art. Some argue that art is a medium of self-expression; such an argument presupposes that the artist sought to express some idea through their brushstrokes. Let us keep this idea aside for a minute and take a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s painstakingly detailed illustrations of the human body. Let us for a moment assume that da Vinci didn’t seek to express himself through his studies of human anatomy and that he simply made these illustrations to record his observations; despite the absence of ‘inspiration’ or ‘artistic intention’, it seems like such a waste to not call these illustrations art. Though not nearly as detailed or demanding in terms of artistic skill required, the diagrams we all invariably sketch in our lab records, be it of microscopes or the cells we see under them, are of the same nature as da Vinci’s illustrations—records of what we saw. If we can consider da Vinci’s sketches art, would the classification not extend to our animal cell diagrams?

Let us look at another example. Any budding artist no doubt undergoes years of training, practising their brushstrokes and their technique until they are able to develop their own style of expression and actually channel their inner selves through their paintbrush. If we stood back and looked at all the ‘failed attempts’ or ‘practice sketches’, I reckon we could find quite a few beautiful oil-on-canvas pieces that would sell for cool sums of money if an artist of some renown were to sign their signature on some corner of the canvas. Despite the very present possibility of self-expression being nearly absent from the equation in these early works and the fact that most of these works may not have resulted in the artist feeling any better or worse than the way they felt before they produced the work, whatever they painted can still be beautiful.

With all that in mind, take a look at figure 1. Does it look like art to you? What if I told you the painting you see in the figure is actually the work of an elephant? If you were to break this entire work into a couple of brushstrokes, it is easy to see how one could train an elephant to repeat these brushstrokes in exchange for some treats. Suddenly, the painting that at first seemed organic starts to seem just a little mechanically produced. In a 2014 article by Megan English et al., it was shown that elephants that produce paintings this way don’t experience any detectable alteration in mental state, which further substantiates the idea that the elephants may not be experiencing the creative process in the way we expect artists to.

However, Jared Diamond showed in his 1986 paper on bower decoration style variations among male bowerbirds (Amblyornis inornatus) that the bowerbirds show variations in bower styles at an individual level. Furthermore, it was seen that younger bowerbirds develop their own increasingly distinct style of bower as they grow older, either through trial and error or by observing other older individuals. Individuals were shown to have colour preferences, and were often particular about where they placed decorations, as evidenced by the fact that if someone moved their decorations, the bird would return the decorative article to its original location. If this entire process were purely determined by innately developed fixed-action-patterns, these individual variations would not have been observed. There appears to be some semblance of a creative process in the way these birds. As for ‘artistic intention’, bowerbirds build in order to attract mates and appeal to the females’ aesthetic senses. In some way, wouldn’t that count as self-expression for the purpose of attracting a mate?

The jury is still out on whether or not to consider these displays of artistic talent in the animal kingdom actually count as art. However, I guess we can all agree that as long as we are willing to see the art in these trained brushstrokes and painstakingly crafted bowers, there is very little that sets a Claude Monet masterpiece apart from Congo the chimpanzee’s ‘lyrical abstract impressionism’.

Figure 1. A Painting by elephant (UCL Grant Museum of Zoology/Rob Eagle).