ABSTRACT
As mentioned in earlier chapters, art is a human-unique, socially anchored communicative system for concepts formed in the mind. Messages are relayed from artist to viewer, and a mechanism for attraction to the message is beauty. Beauty is thus viewed here as a tool to attract attention to what is being communicated in an art work (Zaidel, 2015b ). Art and beauty are intertwined in the sense that the aesthetic reaction attracts our attention to the messages and signals in the art. This notion is labled attention-attraction by D. W. Zaidel (2015b). The idea was developed against a biological background of mate selection strategies, in which males of many species attract the attention of potential female mates to their physical qualities via ritualistic courtship displays (discussed in Chapter 10 ). Choice by a female of the fi ttest male based on a physical display maximizes the survival chance of the off spring, which assumes the further survival of the species as a whole. Thus, courtship displays are a platform where survival-type physically seen qualities are exhibited. We do not know whether or not aesthetic reactions, to any source, are unique to humans; we do not know whether animals possess beauty reactions. It is nevertheless helpful to seek the roots of our aesthetic sense in biology; this topic is discussed in subsequent sections.
