Making art has always been 'costly' (money, time, political threats, survival fitness, ...). So why do we bother? It's all part of what prevents human brains (as opposed to those of animals and computers) from being terribly maladaptive.

The key lies in (Piaget's) constructivism. While we might intuit that meaning is conveyed via a medium/media, how then is art (e.g., the Mona Lisa) distinguished from artifact (e.g., a light bulb)? The book reconsiders the notions of 'intelligence' and 'communication' from a multidisciplinary array of discourses, ultimately proposing a...