The Art Imperative

The Secret Power of Art

The Art Imperative: The Secret Power of Art

by Phillip Romero, M.D.


“This volume is an impressive integration of science and humanities in accounting for the role of art in human evolution and individual development.”                                   

-- Micheal Posner, PhD.
Professor emeritus at University of Oregon and adjunct professor of psychology in psychiatry at Weill Medical College at Cornell University. He is a member of the Dana Foundation Arts and Cognition Consortium.

 

“This attractive and interesting work is an important venture into the borderland between the creative arts and science.”

-- Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Research Professor at Harvard,
author of two Pulitzer Prize winning books, On Human Nature (1977) The Ants (1990)


Although art may seem to have no apparent function, its existence throughout the world suggests the opposite—there must be some secret power encrypted in art that promotes survival value—an imperative that author Phillip Romero, M.D. explores in The Art Imperative: The Secret Power of Art.

Being an artist since childhood, Dr. Romero became deeply curious about how human beings develop passion for art. During medical school, he wrote a developmental psychology essay which became the inspiration for his book. “I speculated that the origins of men’s art-making were inspired by the mystery of creating life and by his early gender-differentiation from the mother in the 2–4-year-old phase,” the author states. “Little boys, I speculated, had a much deeper drive than girls to create some kind of product—painting, drawing, building, inventing, etc—in order to prove their value. Today, there are as many female artists as male, a significant cultural shift, pointing to the fact that all children make art and can become artists.”

Art Imperative: The Secret Power of Art proposes that art-making plays a critical role in human survival. To support this proposal, consilient facts and fact-based theories are integrated from evolutionary sociobiology, developmental neuroscience, attachment theory, consciousness science, and complex systems theory. Central to the proposition are the theories of Buddha, Charles Darwin, John Bowlby, and the science and theories of many others.