Art is Life

Does the ability to make art make us human? or is it the emotional response that we have to art?

(cover by Masako Kubo)

The ability to make art nor the ability to experience emotion because of art make us human, but art does show how we are alive and therefore sentient. Animals have emotions the same way humans do, and they are able to both make art and experience art in similar way to humans. AI (artificial intelligence) does not have the capacity to process emotion, so it cannot be considered to be alive. 

I understand why some people say art is what makes us human, it is how many of us express emotion. Humans, after all, are the ones who came up with art. But part of the reason humans make art is in order to incapsulate an emotion or event; a practice that dates back to the cavemen. Some human figured out how to draw thousands of years ago and passed on that knowledge to other people. In a similar way, we have passed on the knowledge and skills of art making to animals and they have shown they are able to emotionally connect with art. Art used to be uniquely human, but since it is no longer an exclusively human trait art can no longer define us as humans. 

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book “Never Let Me Go” is a story about clones (called copies in the book), how they grew up, and how knowing that their purpose in life was to donate their organs before they got old and die from this. The story focuses on three characters, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, who were copies who went to a special school for copies, called Hailsham, where they were treated more like people and not like human livestock, the way that most other copies were raised. At Hailsham, the administration had the students make art that would be collected for the Gallery; the students associated worth and esteem with the creation of art, especially beautiful art. This reoccurring theme of art and the making of art lent the book to explore the question of “does art make us human.”

Another example from Ishiguro’s book that shows the emotional connection humans have to art comes from a scene in which Kathy was dancing while listening to a song. As she danced, she pretended to hold a baby. Many years later, after Kathy had left Hailsham, she reflected on that event by saying the following.  

"Because whatever the song was really about, in my head, when I was dancing I had my own version. You see, I imagined it was about this woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies. But she'd had one, and she was so pleased ... I didn't think it was so sad at the time, but now, when I think back, it does feel a bit sad." (Ishiguro 271) 

Kathy shows a very interesting quality that can only be found in beings capable of complex emotion, changing her mind and feelings for no particular reason. Computers can only see the world in black and white, more precisely 1s and 0s, so they don’t have the capacity to change on their own. Humans and animals will behave erratically and react differently to the same situations for unknown reasons, computers react the same way every time to the same situations. Kathy shows her sentience and how she is truly alive because she changes how she feels about a specific event, frozen in time, for no explicit reason, it’s just how she feels.

Animal's are no strangers to music either. One of the most wholesome videos on the internet, in my opinion, is video of a man, Paul Barton, playing piano for a blind elephant. By the end of the video we can see the elephant crying. I don’t know why the elephant starts to cry, but it does show how deep of an emotional connection she has with the music and Paul Barton playing the piano. Paul Barton has a whole series of him playing piano for elephants on his YouTube channel, and in every single one of the videos you can see how the elephants are swaying and enjoying the music. These elephants prove to me, through their emotional responses, that animals can appreciate music and that we are connected to the rest of the animal kingdom through emotion; art is just a bridge that connects us. 

Earlier this year a song made by an AI was released called “Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears.” The AI was fed hundreds of Eurovision songs from previous years and it made a song, along with the vocals of a past Eurovision winner, that honestly doesn’t sound bad, but is a bit uncanny at times. Even though this AI was able to make a song, it does not show any life because the emotions of its song come from a culmination of emotions from hundreds of songs. On top of that, it still needed the aid of an actual human being to sing in order to not sound like a cold and lifeless song. AI cannot put their own emotions into art nor can they feel emotions because of art because they are not alive.  

During another part of the book Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, along with some of the other copies, went on a trip to Norfolk where Rodney and his girlfriend Chrissie told them how they would buy birthday cards in bulk. When Ruth is puzzled by their decision, Rodney responds by explaining that they don’t care about having repeating cards because they make illustrations on all the cards to personalize them. Rodney and Chrissie put their emotions into these cards, via illustrations, in order to make them more appealing and animated. By making illustrations on the cards, they have made these cards more sentimentally meaningful for the recipient. Whether or not these copies are human is another question entirely that I am not here to answer, but what I can say definitively is that they are alive and sentient. These copies show not only that they are capable of having emotions but that they are emotionally connected to other people. Rodney and Chrissie show how being alive and making are inescapable parts of each other.

Animals are also capable of making drawings and paintings. Probably the most famous examples of animal artists is Congo the chimpanzee. At first, when Congo started to paint, he just played with the colors and the brushes, but after a while Congo started to be more careful on which colors he would choose, and even became emotionally attached to some of his paintings. Congo’s artistic abilities have been recognized by art critics, have sold for tens of thousands of dollars, and have been collected by people like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read and the Duke of Edinburgh (aka Prince Philip). The emotional attachment and artistic worth Congo’s paintings hold show how art is no longer uniquely human, it can be made by animals and they show the same connections to art as we do. What this truly proves is that art is it shows how art is something made by beings that have emotion, beings that are alive. 

Art shows how we are alive and sentient because it is both a physical manifestation of emotion and an emotional trigger. Computers are not alive and do not have emotion. They are cold calculating machines that do not have the ability to have emotion and are therefore not alive. Even if AI can make art, it is not putting emotion into the art, and on top of that, AI does not have an emotional reaction when presented with art. AI, animals, and humans are capable of making art, but only animals and humans are able to experience art emotionally. Art shows how animals and humans are sentient and alive because it is physical proof that we have emotions.