Throughout history, humans have been driven to create visual art. From the earliest cave drawings to the work of world-renowned modern and postmodern artists, our species has an endless capacity to produce, and hunger to consume, visual representations of human existence. Artists and art aficionados have long pondered the source of our endless creativity. How and why do humans thrive on producing art?

In the past two centuries, two theories dominated the philosophy of visual art. First, Paul Cezanne's popularly accepted modernist theory postulated that our creativity stems from...