So I think there’s a whole lot of things that we do which you might just call stylisation. But what I want to persuade you that they are actually part of this very broad definition of art as I’m using it. I made a list of things that I would put under that umbrella. Symphonies, perfume, sports cars, graffiti, needlepoint, monuments, tattoos, slang, Ming vases, doodles, poodles, apple strudels, still life, second life, bed knobs and boob jobs. All of those things are sort of unnecessary in the sense that we could all survive without doing any of them, but in fact we don’t. We all engage with them.
So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it’s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it – it’s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time – in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy – is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people’s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for?
In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who’s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman’s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music? Why do we have preferences? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance?
We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say. So, as I say, we’re all doing it and we’re all thinking about it. What are we actually doing?
So I want to look at what children do. If you watch children playing what they’re doing mostly is ‘let’s pretend’. Let’s pretend this stick can change you into a frog. But if you have this bottle top and you shine it at me, I can’t fly any more. Something like that. Those are the kind of games that children like to play. And they play them absolutely incessantly. And everybody sort of intuitively knows that children playing is important. It’s how they learn. We also know that if we don’t let children play, they don’t develop well. It’s the process of acclimatising that a child is going through.
So, when a child is saying ‘let’s pretend’, what they’re really saying is ‘let’s imagine’. Imagining is possibly the central human trick. That’s what distinguishes us from all other creatures.
We know from quite careful study now that the amount that other animals can imagine is very, very limited compared to ours. We can imagine worlds that don’t exist. We can not only imagine them, we can imagine what is going on within them. We can change details, we can say ‘okay, I’ll make it this instead of that and then see what happens’. So we can play out whole scenarios in our head in imagination. And that, of course, makes us able to experience empathy, for example. By definition, empathy is having the feeling of what the world is like in somebody else’s head. Well you can only do that, really, if you are skilled at this job of world-building.
