How art invented humanity

JF Mantel | Aeon | 11th July 2026

An interesting take on the topic ‘what is art?’. One type of art is represented by drawings of observable things – like bison on the cave walls of Lascaux. Only after millennia of expressing themselves through symbols and figures, did detailed human images emerge. This signalled another kind of art, the “exploration of those borderlands where the human ends and something else begins. Art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it [brought] forth a world.”