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:
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)