Namedropping: MONA
Are our choices shaped by culture, or is our culture shaped by nature's choices?
David Walsh owns a cricket bat autographed by stars of the 1980s: Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee, Viv Richards and Abdul Qadir to name a few (the bat got signed mostly at the 1983–84 Australian Tri-Series, where Australia hosted Pakistan and the West Indies). David shows his mates and they refuse to bowl at him. ‘You can’t play cricket with that!’ they cry. ‘Of course I can, it’s a fucking cricket bat,’ he replies. He’s wrong, of course, and he knows it. Not only does he know it’s a special cricket bat—an unsigned bat cannot take its place—it’s no longer really a cricket bat at all.
This is not an exhibition about cricket. But the status of David’s non-cricket bat brings certain questions into focus. Why are we drawn to certain objects and people?
What makes the big names big: Porsche, Picasso or Pompidou?
What is the nature of status and why is it useful? Is it just culture, or is there something deeper? Do we have certain ways of caring that our distant ancestors shared, and maybe even benefitted from? Are our choices shaped by culture, or is our culture shaped by nature’s choices? One possible explanation is essentialism, which is the sense that things and people have an essence, spirit or soul, that transcends their material state. Figuring out whether or not this can provide an accurate description of the world isn’t really our objective; essentialism appears to be more about perception, the way we think about things.
This is where status and our ferocious human pursuit of looking good in the eyes of others come into play. A fundamental component of creativity appears to be its use as a status enhancer, for attracting appropriate mates and allies—which is biologically useful and, in the grand scheme of evolutionary history, has helped you survive and to cycle your genes into future generations. This is why we believe namedropping, signalling for status by association—be it for getting sex, power, enhanced reputation or in-group identity—is probably a universal human instinct. Social position is a life and death matter for human beings.
Put simply, we are not evolved to survive and thrive alone. We’re born with brains primed to think about what other people think about, to pick out carers and kin and then, as the years go by, who’s socially helpful and what’s ‘special’. Namedropping can help you influence other people’s thoughts and narrow down who takes notice. And of course, what evolved for status-seeking and happy social interaction in our ancestral environment (come back to my cave and see my etchings) can have all sorts of different outcomes in modern life (eating too much foie gras is bad for you, while shark fin soup is very bad for sharks).
Works by renowned artists including Picasso, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close and Francis Bacon sit alongside contemporary artists including Cornelia Parker, Ai Weiwei, Darren Sylvester, Polly Borland and Elizabeth Peyton. Following on from previous exhibitions that explored the bio-cultural origins of art including The Red Queen (2013) and On the Origin of Art (2016), according to Senior Research Curator Jane Clark, “Namedropping considers the hypothesis that there are biological drivers behind everything that human beings do – including making art.”