Artwork and works of art

How can we understand something so familiar and as foreign as art?

<aside> ❓ Do we need to know what is happening inside people's brains in order to appreciate what they're doing?

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What is art?

• Have different social functions, defined as a variety of things
• Not the gallery art that has "no function" → here it means much more about the culture
• Storytelling, imagery, plays off of social understandings of the world
• Categories of Pleistocene visual culture:
  • Cave paintings
  • Petroglyphs (rock carvings)
  • Portable objects (figurines, plaques, adornments/jewelry)
• Decorative themes
  • Figurative icons: Western Europe - animals, human-like figures
  • Cupoles
  • Finger flutings
  • Linear patterns engraved in bone, ivory, stone, eggshell, shell

*Pleistocene refers to the geological era from 2.5 million to 12,000 BP

A history of Pleistocene Art

Palimpset: An object that is made and worked upon ...

An earlier date

• Edouard Lartet, Massat cave, Ariège (France)
• Discovers carved portable objects in direct context with bones of extinct animals (cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, mammoths)
• First recognition of the true antiquity of these objects

Parietal art

• 1879, Don Marcelino de Sautuola takes daughter to explore the Altamira cavern on northern cost of Spain