Enjoying Art: The Experience of Beauty from Understanding Regularities

Abstract

Art production and enjoyment is a universal human behavior, yet the reasons why it evolved remain elusive. Works of art can convey strong emotions, and various authors attempted to explain the enjoyment of such emotions from an evolutionary perspective. Other authors focused instead on emergent properties of works of art: patterns and coherence, symmetry and proportions, harmony and consonance. Here, I argue that all these emergent properties fall into the definition of regularity, as well as other features that have been overlooked and yet create beauty in all arts (including literature). More precisely, I define a regular composition as having its elements arranged according to a rule that is understandable ‘a priori.’ Furthermore, I propose two novel evolutionary insights into the enjoyment of complex regularities. First, the enjoyment may stem from the drive to gain information on the environment, which would result in a preference for those arrangements that can be understood ‘a priori’ but provide information on a variety of elements. Second, because regularity is mostly a product of life, the attraction to regular stimuli might have evolved to promote the detection of living beings. This would encourage the interaction with other organisms in accordance with Wilson’s ‘biophilia’ hypothesis.