Toward a Unification of the Arts

Abstract

This article presents a manifesto for the scientific exploration of the arts in their totality, rather than conceiving of each artform independently on its own terms. In order to achieve this, I present an analytical procedure that is comprised of two related steps. The first step is to identify instances of sharing in the production mechanisms across artforms, for example the occurrence of rhythmic structure in music, dance, and poetry. The second is to examine how this sharing creates “affordances for combinations,” making it possible for music to be set to a poem or for dance movements to be choreographed to music. By elucidating the neurocognitive mechanisms of sharing across arts domains and the affordances that they offer for creating combinations, it should be possible to achieve a unification of the arts.

An investigation of the impact of encounters with artistic imagination on well-being.

“…The boundaries of our conception could also have been extended to include artifacts that are not traditionally seen as art yet arise from and stimulate people’s imagination (e.g., toys, architecture). Alternatively, the conception of receptive arts may prove to be more productive if it is completely changed so that it is based on underlying processes rather than the form/medium of the art (e.g., Brown, 2018).…”

Delineating the Benefits of Arts Education for Children’s Socioemotional Development

“…Intensive studies on habits of mind are well-established in the visual arts (Hetland et al, 2015), with similar studies recently conducted in music (Hogan and Winner, 2019) and theater (Goldstein and Young, 2019). The similarities among art forms, such as their aesthetic and expressive components, have led some theorists to work toward a unification of the psychological components of art forms (Brown, 2018), but practitioners may or may not agree. To this point, both visual arts and music have been found to employ the habits of mind of persistence (i.e., keep going at practice and working through a problem); imagination (of what changes in a musical performance or visual stimuli may look like); and expression of ideas and meaning (Hetland et al, 2007(Hetland et al, , 2015Hogan and Winner, 2019).…”

The neural basis of creative production: A cross-modal ALE meta-analysis

“…There is no question that the future of the field will one day be dominated by work on collaborative creativity as well as its social determinants and effects. Creativity and innovation are intimately linked with the mechanisms of the cultural evolution of products (Brown, 2021;Gabora, 2019).…”