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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science pp 1–9Cite as

Art

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Definition

Art is conventionally defined as the corpus of human activities devoted to creating visual, aural, language-based, and/or performance-related artifacts and processes that express an individual’s (or a group’s) imaginative ideas, concepts, and/or skills and techniques, these artifacts having been designed to be consumed by an audience and enjoyed for their aesthetic beauty, emotional engagement, and/or intellectual stimulation.

A Darwinian definition of art would be a little different from this type of conventional definition of the scope of art. Art can better be defined in evolutionary terms as those artifacts that are produced by means of activities and thoughts that employ the corpus of evolved psychological mechanisms that are adaptations which have been designed to engage and fulfill a set of evolved emotional and intellectual capacities for aesthetic pleasure, technical ability, creative construction, critical engagement, expressing individual identities, and...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. London, UK

    Vincent Barnett

Authors
  1. Vincent Barnett
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Correspondence to Vincent Barnett .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  2. Rochester, MI, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. No affiliation provided

    Haley Dillon

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Barnett, V. (2019). Art. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_339-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_339-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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