The Democracy of Beauty
Your appreciation of art operates through precisely the same mechanism as a peahen's attraction to plumage: random sexual selection that serves no survival function. Beauty emerges as evolution's universal accident, cheap and democratic, practised by beetles and birds with equal fluency. What we imagine as humanity's highest faculty reveals our deepest participation in the ordinary mechanisms of life. Aesthetic experience dissolves the human-nature boundary rather than reinforcing it. The randomness that makes beauty purposeless makes it universal; the arbitrariness that makes it humble makes it profound. Art belongs to everyone because it belongs to no one.