Art and Music
Like several other species, elephants are able to produce abstract art using their trunks to hold brushes. An example of this was shown in the TV program Extraordinary Animals, in which elephants at a camp in Thailand were able to draw self-portraits with flowers. Although the images were drawn by the elephants, there was always a trainer assisting and guiding the movement.
A popular video showing an elephant painting a picture of another elephant became widespread on internet news and video websites. The website snopes.com, which specializes in debunking urban legends, lists the video as "true", in that the elephant produced the brush strokes, but notes that the similarity of the produced paintings is indicative of a learned sequence of strokes rather than a creative effort on the part of the elephant.
An elephant at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. has displayed the ability to play the harmonica and various horn instruments. She reportedly always ends her songs with a crescendo.
Read more about this topic: Elephant Cognition
Famous quotes containing the words art and, art and/or music:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.... Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)