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• Arts & Culture

How do nonhuman animals make art? Art as a practice of interspecies questioning

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (2022)

This issue poses, once more, the centuries-old question: “What is art?” and invited respondents to answer this question either from the perspective of the “creator” or the “recipient” of art. We were invited to answer a question about “the essence of art”, and to specify the position from which we write in terms of this creator-recipient duality. Conventionally and controversially for some of us, providing essential defini-tions of art (as well as normative evaluations and ontologies of art) has been a task that the Western philosophy of art has assumed for itself. Philosophy has conceived its task as defining the properties which can and cannot be assigned to art as a phenomenon in ways that some have critiqued as an authoritarian gesture.1 The project of this journal issue invites other voices into this definitional practice: gathering a “variety of responses from very different people who interact with art in different ways”. This is a welcome gesture towards a greater inclusi-vity; to perform art’s philosophy otherwise. However, my starting point is to speculate towards a further extension or mutation of this gesture. My starting point is the provocation—both playful and serious—that we need to invite nonhuman animals into this questioning too. We, human animals, need to find ways to ask nonhuman animals what art is or, better, what art might become. “What happens to standard human definitions of art when nonhuman animals are the creators and recipients, artists and au-diences?”

Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura (2022) ‘How Do Nonhuman Animals Make Art? Art as a Practice of Interspecies Questioning’, edited by Anna Kawalec, Annals of Cultural Studies: What is Art? Horizons of Creator and Recipient, Vol 13 No 4 (2022), pp. 59-64

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