Order

In What is Art For? Dissanayake discusses one of the many ways art may have developed in many different ways, and one way is the human need for order. According to Dissanayake "human beings seem to have a natural tendency to make sense of their environment, to find or impose upon a pattern of order and hence comprehensibility"(114). This need for order often helps humans to make sense of their environment like making categories such as edible, not edible and safe and not safe and many more. Humans have been able to distinguish themselves from other animals the in the sheer amount of things we can categorize and the complexity humans show toward categorizing, in ways that humans can make sense of and feel familiar with. This has a dramatic effect on art because it grounds things in reality or puts thing into a state that people can understand much better. Humans often participate in many patterns such as rituals and myths and language, and art if not already infused. But this need for order may have also shaped humans evolutionarily to begin the production of the art, and may have been one of many factors that lead humans to develop art and how it was selected to survive.

                Art has a tendency to create order and this reminded me of last week when two classmates presented on monsters in art. A lot of those pieces that were displayed were a way for themselves and the viewer to make an image of something that might not have an image and create that order or categorization into something that may have been unknown. This also puts something that may have been once feared or supernatural and make it more relate able or familiar to the viewer and make it less (or more depending on the situation) as scary or unknown. This may be even for the artist themselves to take something that may confuse or scare them in their mind and when they put it into their medium in their interpretation and in doing so gives them order from chaos and sometimes makes that idea less frightful.

Dissanayake, Ellen. What Is Art For? Seattle, Wash. [u.a.: Univ. of Washington, 2002. Print.