Art Cognitive Science

This book is for the reader who believes that thinking about and making art is intelligent behavior and that art as a subject in the K-12 school curriculum should not be used as an alibi for other curricular objectives. It examines and makes explicit those cognitive behaviors normally associated with most higher order thinking and problem solving activity and explains how they function in the act of creative forming. Its goal is ultimately to find ways to use these behaviors in the construction of an intelligent art curriculum for K-12 American schools.

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities–science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art–that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things.