Regarding those who collect art, a personal taxophilic theme has a door
open onto human subcultures, where for a variety of reasons, it is
possible to find a responsive set of like-minded patrons. Collectors are
concerned with differentiated objects, which often have exchange value,
which may also be objects of preservation, trade, social ritual, exhibition,
and perhaps generators of profit. Such objects, whether works of art or
matchboxes, are accompanied by projects. Though they remain
interrelated in a personal collection, their interplay through projects of
selection and research involves the social world outside the collection
and embraces human relationships, which are created to communicate
with like-minded collectors. Eventually, a collector may come to have
high group status through a personal body of knowledge about the
makers of his objects, which is greater than that of the maker.
It is true to say that virtually every human culture expresses itself
artistically in some way or other; so the need to experience the
satisfaction of discovering harmony in particular arrangements of forms,
the 'beauty-reaction', cements strong social bonds between people.
However, in the world of art there are no absolutes involved. Nothing is
considered to be beautiful by all peoples everywhere. Every revered
object is considered ugly by someone somewhere. From this
perspective, beauty is put into the eye of the beholder by education, and
comes from nowhere else. The sense of beauty derives primarily from
our subtle comparisons and classifications by which we harmonise set
themes, as it does with natural objects of survival value. However, the
difference is that we select our art themes by personal choice. Forms
are chosen from past experiences, or taken second-hand from other
artists, that have a potential for a complex set of variations. Once this
process of experimenting with forms wrested from nature is underway,
the artist can then rapidly shift his themes further and further away from
the natural starting point, until the themes employed become abstract
and their purpose is to express a highly personal mental state. It does
seem that the more a set of forms departs from the common perception
of reality, the more we respond, and commit it to memory through innate
feelings for certain types and combinations of lines, planes and colour.
In other words, the picture is perceived as a unique piece of decoration.
However, there is little research on this point.
Either way, whether staying close to imitated natural objects, or creating
entirely novel abstracted compositions, the artist's work is judged finally,
not on any absolute values but on the basis of how ingeniously he
manages to ring the changes on the themes he has already employed
successfully, or that have been employed in acceptable ways by his
predecessors. The quality of the beauty will depend on how he
manages to avoid the most obvious and clumsy of possible variations,
and how he contrives to get his viewers to perceive daring, subtle,
amusing or surprising variants of the theme without actually destroying it.
This is the true inventive nature of beauty, and it is a social game that
human animals play with consummate skill both as artists and viewers.
he rewards of learning the taxonomic rules of a particular variation of the
game are accessible to everyone. The rules are based on arbitrary
cannons, such as, which shapes and colours of dogs are accepted by
the kennel club, which arrangements of flowers are prized by the flower-
arranging society, which proportions of breasts, to waist, to hips win
prizes in beauty contests, and which kinds of water colours the hanging
committee of the local art club finds acceptable. The rewards of playing
the beauty game are social acceptance and personal status in a group
of like-minded people.
The penalties of non-conformity with local pictorial cannons for depicting
the human body can be devastating. Puritans wiped England almost
clean of images after the Reformation. In 1996, the Taliban in
Afghanistan, taking control of Herat, stripped the city of its televisions-
its human- imaging machines- and skewered them to create
scarecrow towers, festooned with fluttering videotape, at the city gates.
But we do not need to look for exotic locations to find iconoclasm. Every
neighbourhood campaign against a shop displaying pornographic
magazines reveals a common thread of recognition that pictures are
made to cater to human desires, and that images can divert human
behaviour from group norms. As long as images continue to have unruly
force within society, so are group objections organised to contain them.
Lines are drawn around unacceptable ways of depicting the human
body. In particular, artists have always struggled against society to
depict primary sexual organs, and their use in sexual intercourse as one
of its most robust pleasures. Here the artist runs up against the concept
of taboo zones. These seem to have emerged from deep biological
roots to stabilise human social behaviour and become a fundamental
social barrier to the erotic arts. Pradoxically, they persist even in a
Western world obsessed with sex as a marketing tool, a weapon in
political struggle, a mainstay of journalism and the daily output of soap
operas.
The biological roots of sexual display cannot be denied. Much of the
high coloration of birds has an aggressive function, or a courtship
function, or both. The great train of the male quetzal bird is a badge of
territorial ownership, and a courtship organ besides. The spread train of
the peacock is used primarily in courtship; other game birds, such as
grouse, reach their full glory in territorial aggression. Among the most
extraordinary display organs of all are the courtship dresses of
pheasants and ducks, though some passerines (such as umbrella birds)
run them close. These predominantly avian male features have always
been a subject of Western Art.
All plumage and adornment, of course, enables birds to recognize each
other. Male and female may be equally bright or dull. But those of about
half the birds of the world are outwardly indistinguishable, except from
their behaviour and song. In most of the rest males outshine females,
though a few females outshine males. In some cases, such as eclectus
parrots, each has a special rich plumage of its own. On some cryptic
birds the badge of identity is shown only at takeoff, when the flock is in
danger, or in display.
Recognition marks are essentially interspecific, enabling a bird to
distinguish those of its own species from those of otherwise similar-
looking species of the same family or order. However, Peter Scott's
study of the 200 or so Bewick's swans that winter each year at the
Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Slimbridge, in Gloucestershire, England,
suggests that they may also be intraspecific, enabling birds of the same
species to identify each other individually. Scott and his daughter
compiled a dossier of side-face and full-face portraits of several
hundred Bewick's swans, and have discovered that in no two individuals
are the black-and-yellow recognition patterns on the beak identical. They
themselves can identify a great many individuals on sight; and the
swans, whose interest must be at least as great, can presumably do the
same.
