    From The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller.

    Art is sexual display of fitness by the artist. Art is not sublimation, or display of sexual fitness by the artist as Sigmund would put it.

    Darwin has discovered two kinds of selection processes: survival of the fittest (force behind convergent evolution), and reproduction of the fittest (force behind divergent evolution, "males court, females choose"). Unsurprisingly his discovery of sexual selection via female choice has been largely ignored by prudish, patriarchal scientists until 1980s.

    An example of sexual selection for art creation:
    The male bowerbirds of Australia construct enormous and purely aesthetic displays. Each of 18 species constructs different style of nest, only by males and only for courtship. Once inseminated, females go off to build their own tiny nests to raise offspring by themselves, rather like Picasso's mistresses. Males defend their work and try to destroy that of rival's. Regent and Satin bowerbirds use brushes made out of leaves and regurgitated paint. Males are also brightly colored and dance in front of their bowers when female arrives.

    Said Satin Bowerbird, when interviewed for Artforum magazine:

        I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable... It is happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to insinuate that I create in order to procreate.

    We, humans, have evolved instincts to create ornaments and works of art that are distinct from the sexual instincts behind copulation [no Freudian sexual sublimation in other words]. Yet both types of instinct may have evolved through sexual selection.

    Art does not have to be about sex to serve the purposes of attracting a mate, it can be about anything at all, or about nothing, as in the geometric art of Islam, or Donald Judd's stainless-steel minimalist sculpture.

    To be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low fitness individuals to produce. Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty, [novelty], and high cost. Hence "art" is honorific term: the art of math proof, of making fire without matches, of cooking, of sex.

    The aesthetic of elite art reflects verbal displays of superiority in its own right - the art of contrived preferences.
