Quantum Story Musings

[silver_tusk]

Pull up a chair and imagine something with me. It's the paleolithic era and a man has decided to gather members of his tribe (Much as I'm doing with you now) to hear a story. It is a time before the broadening of language, before the development of poetic form. Stories in this time are starkly functional: The story of what has happened, the

Comments

[archangelbebop]

Tough one. Scott McCloud (understanding comics guy) would say it became art the first time it was told with anything not required for the survival of the species (embelished, told for pleasure to people who had already heard it, etc.). His view is that art is everything humans do that is not directly required for survival

[silver_tusk]

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at; I wanted to show how the tradition of art could have occurred naturally as an outgrowth of our survival instinct, and in a rather intriguing fashion.

If someone wanted to claim that art simply stems from extraneous language then it's easy to make the peacock argument; that descriptive vocabulary evolved from a need to adorn functional stories so that they became more memorable and more widely told. That's how I take McCloud to think, and he's probably right as far as that goes, but that's more a matter of memetics, than art.

I'd agree with you though. What I think is that the potential for stories to become art existed even when vocabulary was restricted to functional terms. It's the desire on the part of the storyteller to communicate something that he personally considers of value to the well-being and ultimate survival of his tribe that differentiates the story as art. And that impulse says something beautiful and fascinating about human nature to me.

[silver_tusk]

Georgia has turned you into a bitter and biting old girl, ya know that? Me blabbing about study abroad will transpire after I actually, ya know, apply for it.

[silver_tusk]

Arts major, sorry, can't help being a little abnormal.