Bianca Bosker

I’d gotten obsessed with understanding why art matters, if it does, and whether quality time with a few smears of colored rock on stretched cloth—a “painting” as it’s more commonly known—can really transform our existence.

. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia where, around 45,500 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testicles for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting the portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J. Z. Young.

The people I was meeting worshipped the idea of an “Eye,” by which they didn’t mean the organ, but a painstakingly cultivated outlook that allegedly enables you to see lots that doesn’t meet the eye, like who’ll be the next Picasso or what’s transcendent about a middle-aged man climbing up a ladder to lecture about burnt pubes.