Offers a way of understanding what art is and why human beings create it. This book asserts that humans create things in order to work out ideas. It draws on examples from several societies to argue that the art-making impulse is primarily cognitive and only secondarily aesthetic. It is intended for those who creates or thinks about works of art.
A major new vision of what art is and why we create it, in the tradition of George Kubler's The Shape of Time and Michael Baxandall's Patterns of Intention.
