CARS Diagnostic Spoiler

[treeclimbingmonkey]

The most remarkable thing about prehistoric naturalism is not that it is older than the geometric style, which makes so much more of a primitive impression, but that it already reveals all the typical phases of development through which art has passed in modern times and is not in any sense the merely instinctive, static phenomenon that scholars obsessed with geometric and rigorously formal art declare it to be.

There are no parallels whatever between this prehistoric art and child art. Children's drawings are rationalistic, not sensory: They show what the child and the adult artist know, not what they actually see; they give a theoretically synthetic, not an optically organic, picture of the object.

The peculiar thing about the naturalistic drawings of the Old Stone Age is, on the other hand, that they give the visual impression in such a direct, unmixed form, free from all intellectual trimmings or restrictions. The painters of the Paleolithic Age were still able to see delicate shades with the naked eye that modern people are able to discover only with the help of complicated scientific instruments.

What was the purpose behind this art? Was it the expression of a joy of life insistent on being recorded and repeated? Or the satisfaction of the play instinct and delight in embellishment? Was it the fruit of leisure, or had it some definite practical purpose? Have we to see in it a plaything or a tool in the struggle for a livelihood? We know that it was the art of primitive hunters living on an unproductive, parasitic economic level, who had to gather or capture their food rather than produce it themselves, who to all appearances still lived at the stage of primitive individualism in unstable, almost entirely unorganized social patterns, in small isolated hordes, and who believed in no gods, in no world and life beyond death.

In this age of purely practical life, everything obviously still turned around the bare earning of a livelihood, and there is nothing to justify us in assuming that art served any other purpose than a means to the procuring of food. All the indications point rather to the fact that it was the instrument of a magical technique and, as such, had a thoroughly pragmatic function aimed entirely at direct economic objectives. It was a technique without mystery, a matter-of-fact procedure, the objective application of methods that had as little to do with mysticism and esoterism as when we set mousetraps, manure the ground, or take a drug.

The pictures were part of the technical apparatus of this magic; they were the "trap" into which the game had to go—or rather, they were the trap with the already captured animal—for the picture was both representation and the things represented, both wish and wish fulfillment, at one and the same time. The paleolithic hunter and painter felt in possession of the thing itself in the picture, felt power over the object in the portrayal of the object. The hunter believed the real animal actually suffered the killing of the animal portrayed in the picture. The pictorial representation was nothing but the anticipation of the desired effect; the real event had inevitably to follow the magical sample action—or rather, to be already contained within it, as both were separated from each other merely by the supposedly unreal medium of space and time.



A. Hauser, Social History of Art, 1951.




Questions:
To a modern way of thinking, the author's discussion of the purpose of prehistoric art (final paragraph) appears contrary to the assertion that prehistoric art was:

Hi all, I don't get why B is right?
Thanks

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[FrameshiftAndrew]

This question strikes me as sort of strange in that it seems to hinge on an understanding of the "modern point of view" that isn't really spelled out very explicitly in the passage. What it's getting at is the idea that the whole description in the final paragraph sure sounds (to us, as modern readers) awfully vague, mysterious, and magical for something that the author says was a "technique without mystery" in the preceding paragraph.

In terms of why A, C, and D are wrong—A is out because it just copies and pastes text from the final paragraph, so it would be a circular and pointless answer. C and D are kind of conceptually similar, which in and of itself is kind of a red flag. Of those two answer choices, D is the worst from this perspective because it clearly entails C, and both can't be right—so D must be wrong. But perhaps more to the point, C and D both relate to some historical aspect of the context in which this art was produced, and nothing in the final paragraph undermines or is inconsistent with those assertions. C in particular is just a neutral description of the lifestyle of people who produced this art, and none of the philosophical verbiage in the last paragraph changes or contradicts that.