“Making Special”: Toward a Behavior of Art

1. “Making Special”:Toward a Behavior of Art Ellen Dissanayake Liedeke Oosterik

2. Ritual and Play are both (often unconsciously) intertwined with art • in concept, practice and theories (p74) • Only art – no literature

3. Play • Ways of behaving that have no manifest survival value (p74) • Accepted “nonseriousness” (“nonfunctional”) (p75) • Derives pleasure, entertainment and satisfaction (p77) • Exchange of tensions and releases (p77) • Concerned with form, rule and ritual (p77)

4. Play • Exaggeration (p77) • Imitation (p78) • Elaboration (p78) • Metaphorical nature (p78) • Acceptance of “make believe” (p78)

5. Permanent Serious Passive Ennobles Teaches Control Art portrays reality Transient Frivolous Active Distracts Amuses Out of hand Play is evasive fantasy or wish fulfillment without real assimilation Art vs. Play (p79) Art is a “goal directed form of play”

6. Ritual • Acquires through the course of evolution a communicatory function (p80) • Emotionally motivated behavior is “formalized” or “canalized” (p83) • Human ritual is both a means and an end in expressing and reinforcing social cohesion (p83) • Larger than its individual participants (p83)

7. Human ritual ceremony (p84) • Objects/words out of everyday context • Metaphorical use • Symbolic use • Accentuation • Exaggeration

8. Says something new and individual Introduces wider world Unique interpretations New knowledge and possibilities Reinforces established communal beliefs and practices Repetitive Predictable Somewhat sterile Arts are associated with ceremonial ritualsArt vs. Ritual (p80)

9. Most serious Functional To cure To bring success To regularize Not characterized by the enjoyment it affords it participants Nonserious Nonfunctional “have fun” “fool around” Almost always pleasurable Ritual vs. Play (p87)

10. Ritual and Play (p89) • Highly social • Tension and release • Out-of-context behavior • Manipulation of expectancy and anticipation • Repetition, exaggeration, imitation and elaboration

11. Making special(p92) • Is more than marking • Places the activity or artifact in a “realm” different from the everyday • The making special acknowledges, reveals and embodies the alternative reality

12. Not all bracketing or transforming or making special is art (p98) • Just as not all written text is literature • Art can be called an instance of making special (p99) • Literature can be called an instance of written language

13. Literature • Words are otherwise handled using considerations apart from its utility (p99) • Before you can be said to write literature, you must be able to realize that you have written something and made it into a text others will appreciate in terms of that arrangement and embellishment (p102)

14. Literature • Earliest instances of making special would have been in recognizing specialness (p104) • Far more elaborate than necessary for simple transmission of information (p103) • Individuals show different inclinations and abilities to make things special, these can be explained as a consequence of genetic variability (p106)