What Birds Teach Us About Art and Aesthetics

The ideas of biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum are the central axis of this analysis. Prum is widely known for his research on the evolution of bird plumage, the mechanics of biological color, and evolutionary aesthetics. He currently serves as the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University and is Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

For this bird expert, aesthetics is a biological phenomenon of great importance in the animal and plant worlds; art lies in the signals that living beings produce to attract those who will fertilize them. The colors, scents, and textures that flowers use to attract pollinators; the songs and dances of male birds to seduce females; and, in general, every kind of display in nature are all forms of art.

Prum argues that aesthetics is neither an invention exclusive to human culture nor a mere incidental by-product of evolution. Studying birds and plants, he maintains that animals and other biotic organisms take an active part in aesthetic processes driven by sexual selection and desire.

Aesthetics is the result of a coevolutionary process, in the human sphere as much as in the biotic one. This means that beauty and art forms arise and evolve through dynamic feedback between the producers or displayers of the traits (whether feathers, songs, flowers, or human works) and the brains that judge that information. A paradigmatic example is the relationship between hummingbirds and the flowers whose beauty and scent have evolved for them; in turn, the birds’ beaks and their susceptibility to being attracted evolve alongside. Beauty acts as the engine that ensures the survival and continuity of the species involved. When an aesthetic attraction or positive response occurs, the relationships between the senders and receivers of the signal become far more stable, nuanced, and deep. It is precisely these constant interactions that keep beauty evolving, diversifying, and active over time.

In the human world, the author points out that art is a form of communication that coevolves with the participation of aesthetic evaluators (judges, individuals, dealers, critics, galleries…) and with artistic production (works and performances). The dynamic interaction between creators and judges gives validity to some forms of expression over others, generating the criteria of taste and the changes in it. Collectors, audiences, readers, and critics play as active a role in this process of transformation as the artists, authors, and performers themselves.

For Prum, the world of art—both biotic and human—is not a static structure with closed borders but a dynamic process; in the human sphere, it is also a historical process. Art does not exist by being bounded within rigid frontiers, but through its capacity to endure in time and history with an identity of its own.

There are internal and external factors that drive these changes. Imitation among humans causes some art forms to spread around the world, a phenomenon also common in birds. Lawrence’s thrush, in the Amazon, imitates dozens of songs of other species, not to deceive, but to broaden its own acoustic repertoire and its aesthetic learning. Prum tells us in this regard:

“Song learning always involves a process of aesthetic evaluation of the available social tutors (usually conspecifics) and a process of vocal emulation that gradually converges on an individual adult vocal repertoire.”

“Polyglot reed warblers acquire a diversity of samples from the avian aesthetic cultures of eastern Africa, incorporate them into their own aesthetic repertoires, and import them, through annual intercontinental migrations, to perform them in the marshes of northern Europe […] Thus, imitative songs are aesthetic samples of the socio-sexual art world of the source species, incorporated into the socio-sexual art world of the imitating species.”

“Even among bird species with learned vocalizations (that is, with culture), there are documented cases of songs that have evolved toward higher frequencies in urban environments to avoid acoustic interference from city noise.”

In the worlds of human art, we see a constant interpenetration of different styles and realms. Classical music can draw inspiration from popular music, and vice versa. In ballet, we see how choreographies have gradually become interwoven with the dances of different cultures. Technology drives new forms of expression (photography, film, electric guitars, keyboards), and the same is true of new materials. Human beings make art out of whatever crosses their path. This is a point that Prum does not address and that, to me, seems significantly important.

Personally, I believe that human beings beautify, complexify, specialize, improve, and optimize in some direction whatever they find along their way; to those extraordinary objects and actions that rise above the norm we grant great social value, and we call them artistic. From my perspective, what defines the artistic is not aesthetics in itself, but optimization in a socially valuable direction. I agree with Prum that art and aesthetics are necessarily population-level phenomena—let us call them social—that can only be understood within the framework of the communities where they occur, persist, and change (the philosopher of art Arthur Danto thought likewise).

For me, beauty is one way of increasing the value of actions and objects, but it is not the only one; one can even do without it and still turn an object or an action into art. For Prum, by contrast, there is no art without beauty and no beauty without art. Although he is right to give great value to beauty, it does not manifest in exactly the same way in the human world as in the biotic one. Pleasant smells are not necessarily “beautiful,” but they are attractive and pleasurable. We human beings handle a broad repertoire of categories (I don’t know whether the same is true of animals), although it is worth noting that animals are attracted to what seems beautiful to them, and what seems beautiful to them is what attracts them.

Prum points out that for humans there are complex aesthetic categories—such as the ironic, the elegant, the heroic, or the kitsch—that depend on cultural meaning and context. Nevertheless, he maintains that beauty is the most powerful aesthetic value because it keeps the evaluators’ positive response alive, ensuring that the social relationship of artistic communication remains active, evolving, and resistant to the stagnation of purely “anaesthetic” or hyperconceptual art. For my part, I believe there are many additional aesthetic categories, such as order, style, complexity, rarity, novelty, originality, meaning, metaphor, evocative resonance, specialness, repletion, cohesion, prestige, and standing out above other objects of the same category.

I like it when Prum points out that abstraction, conceptual complexity, and opacity can be intriguing and attractive properties at a given moment, but not in the long term. “Anaesthetic” art, as he calls it, becomes a dead end because the absence or denial of sensory engagement numbs the social relationship with the communities of evaluators that necessarily drive aesthetic coevolution.

In conclusion, although I agree with Richard Prum that beauty and aesthetic coevolution drive the continuity of artistic expressions in both nature and human culture, my perspective broadens this framework by placing optimization and social whims as the true engines of the artistic; thus, art is not exhausted in the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure or in sensory engagement, but lies in the human capacity to transform and elevate any object or action above the norm.