ABSTRACT
Brian Boyd emphasizes the importance of attention and the possibility of art to “reconfigure minds” via the focus of attention. For Ellen Dissanayake and like-minded scholars, art can be described as a behavior by describing what people do when they make art—when they “artify”. The thesis proposed to explain the relation of art and religion, then, is this: there is a human universal behavioral tendency that is ancestral to both art and religion. Steven Mithen has provided an example: Even though a deer or a horse may not think about his foraging and mobility patterns in the same way as Modern Humans, imagining that it does can act as an excellent predictor for where the animal feeds and the direction in which it may move. Boyd suggests that [c]reativity matters to us as humans, but may seem difficult to account for in terms of hard biological costs and benefits.
