Animal-made art consists of works by animals, that have been considered by humans to be artistic, including visual works, music, photography, and videography. Some of these are created naturally by animals, often as courtship displays, while others are created with human involvement.
There have been debates about the copyright status of these works, with the United States Copyright Office stating in 2014 that works created by animals cannot be copyrighted.
Painting
Donkey
Lolo the donkey ("Joachim-Raphaël Boronali") painting in front of witnesses
During the late 1950s biologists began to study the nature of art in humans. Theories were proposed based on observations of non-human primate paintings. Hundreds of such paintings were cataloged by Desmond Morris. Morris[2] and his associate Tyler Harris interpreted these canvas paintings as indications of an intrinsic motivation toward abstract creativity, as expressed through an exploration of the visual field and color. Many of these painters progressed over time by expanding or contracting the area of paint coverage, the horizontal or vertical stroke relationships, and even the development of content. Such paintings were exhibited in many modern art museums during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The cultural and scientific interest in these paintings diminished steadily and little note is taken today.
The most successful chimpanzee artist is Congo (1954–1964). Morris offered him a pencil and paper at two years of age, and by the age of four, Congo had made 400 drawings and paintings. His style has been described as "lyrical abstract impressionism".[3] Media reaction to Congo's painting abilities were mixed, although relatively positive and accepted with interest. Pablo Picasso was reportedly a "fan" of his paintings, and hung one in his studio after receiving it as a gift.[3][4] In 2005 Congo's paintings were included in an auction at Bonhams alongside works by Renoir and Warhol. They sold for more than expected, while Renoir's and Warhol's did not sell. American collector Howard Hong purchased three of Congo's works for over US$25,000.[4][5][6]
A more recent example is Pockets Warhol, a capuchin monkey from the Story Book Farm Primate sanctuary, who has been painting since 2011.[7]
Elephants in captivity have been trained to paint as a form of zoo environment and behavioral enrichment. An example of this is seen at Melbourne Zoo.[8] However, research published in 2014 indicated that elephants gain little enrichment from the activity of painting apart from the positive reinforcement given by zookeepers during the activity. The scientists concluded that the "benefits of this activity appear to be limited to the aesthetic appeal of these paintings to the people viewing them". The elephants draw the same painting each time and have learned to draw it line-for-line.[9] It has been alleged that cruelty is involved in some tourist destinations where elephants are trained to paint.[10]
Bini the Bunny (born 2012) is a Holland lop rabbit who paints abstract art on small canvases, holding a brush in his mouth. His paintings are featured on a YouTube channel.[16]
Pigcasso (2016–2024) was a South African pig who gained international notoriety for her abstract expressionist paintings, which have sold for thousands of dollars around the world.[17] Pigcasso was rescued from an industrial hog farm as a piglet by her owner, Joanne Lefson, who taught her to paint using positive reinforcement techniques. Lefson used the proceeds of the sales of Pigcasso's paintings to raise funds for her farm sanctuary in Franschhoek, South Africa.
Each of Pigcasso's works was signed by means of the artist dipping her nose-tip into beetroot ink and touching it onto the canvas.
Pigcasso and Lefson are the first non-human/human collaboration to have held an art exhibition together, which took place at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town in 2018.[18][19] Pigcasso's most expensive work sold in December 2021 for US$27,000, making it the most expensive animal-made art piece ever to have been sold at the time.[20][21][22]
Other animals
A spokeswoman for the United States Association of Zoos and Aquariums in 2008 said that painting animals at zoos in the US included kangaroos, ocelots, red pandas, a rhinoceros and a Komodo dragon.[23]
An elephant at West Midland Safari Park was reported to have taken a 'selfie' using a dropped mobile phone belonging to visitor Scott Brierley in May 2014.[26]
In 2015, an elephant in Koh Phangan, Thailand, took a running GoPro camera from traveller Christian Le Blanc and filmed some video footage.[24]
Bears
One of the videos created by bears in 2023 using Tom Scott's lost GoPro camera
In 2023, after British YouTuber Tom Scott made a video featuring bears at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in Montana, the bears found a lost GoPro camera and accidentally turned it on, capturing two videos which were recovered by Scott when the camera was found. Scott declared that as the footage was "created entirely by bears", he believed it to be in the public domain, and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.[27][28]
It has been noted since ancient times that elephants seem to have an affinity for music. The Ringling Bros circus featured an "Elephant brass band" which they claimed could "play popular songs of the day in tune and in time".[31] In the 1950s, German evolutionary biologist Bernard Rensch found that elephants can distinguish 12 tones on the musical scale and remember simple melodies, even when played on different instruments at various pitches, timbres, and meters.[32][33]
The Thai Elephant Orchestra is a musical ensemble consisting of six to fourteen Thai elephants who play heavy-duty musical instruments. Three CDs of their music have been released.[34]
The copyright to an artistic work is typically held by its author. In cases where the artistic work was created by an animal, intellectual property analysts Mary M. Luria and Charles Swan have argued that neither the human who provides the equipment used to create the work, nor the human who owns the animal itself (when applicable), can hold the copyright to the resulting work by the animal. In these cases, the animal's work was not an intellectual creation of the humans, and copyrights can only be held by legal persons—which an animal is not.[37]
The question of ownership of copyright for photographs created by animals was tested in the monkey selfie case, in mid-2014, after equipment owned by nature photographer David Slater was used by a Celebes crested macaque in Tangkoko Nature Reserve in Indonesia to take a series of self-portraits. Slater claimed copyright over the image, arguing that he had set up the situation. Other individuals and organizations, however, argued that the photographs, as the work of a non-human animal (and thus not the work of a legal person), were public domain.[25] Slater stated that the upload of the images to Wikimedia Commons, a free media repository, had cost him more than £10,000 in lost income; he unsuccessfully attempted to have the media removed.[38][39] In August 2014, the United States Copyright Office clarified their rules to explicitly state that items created by a non-human cannot be copyrighted, and lists in their examples a "photograph taken by a monkey", which would appear to reference this case.[40][41]
↑ Daniel Groinowski, Aux commencements du rire moderne. L'esprit fumiste, José Corti, Paris, 1997, p.296.
↑ Morris, Desmond (1962). The biology of art: A study of the picture-making behavior of the great apes and its relationship to human art. Taylor & Francis.
↑ Matsuura, Keiichi (1 January 2015). "A new pufferfish of the genus Torquigener that builds "mystery circles" on sandy bottoms in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan (Actinopterygii: Tetraodontiformes: Tetraodontidae)". Ichthyological Research. 62 (2): 207–212. doi:10.1007/s10228-014-0428-5. ISSN1616-3915. S2CID254164102.
Dudley Zoo & Castle is a 40-acre (16 ha) zoo located within the grounds of Dudley Castle in the town of Dudley, in the Black Country region of the West Midlands, England. The Zoo opened to the public on 18 May 1937. It contains 12 modernist animal enclosures and other buildings designed by the architect Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton Group. The zoo went into receivership in 1977 and was purchased by Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council. Dudley Zoo is now operated by Dudley and West Midlands Zoological Society, founded in 1978 and a registered charity.
The Oregon Zoo, originally the Portland Zoo and later the Washington Park Zoo, is a zoo located in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon, approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) southwest of downtown Portland. Founded in 1888, it is the oldest zoo west of the Mississippi River.
Beijing Zoo is a zoological park in Xizhimen, Xicheng District, Beijing. Founded in 1906 during the late Qing dynasty, it is the oldest zoo in China and oldest public park in northern China. The zoo is also a center of zoological research that studies and breeds rare animals from various continents.
Port Lympne Hotel & Reserve near the town of Hythe in Kent, England is set in 600 acres (2.4 km2) and incorporates the historic Port Lympne Mansion, and landscaped gardens designed by architect Sir Herbert Baker, for Sir Philip Sassoon.
Congo (1954–1964) was an artist and painter who was also a chimpanzee. Zoologist, author and surrealist painter Desmond Morris first observed his abilities when the chimpanzee was offered a pencil and paper at two years of age. By the age of four, Congo had made 400 drawings and paintings. His style has been described as "lyrical abstract impressionism".
The Born Free Foundation is an international wildlife charity that campaigns to "Keep Wildlife in the Wild". It protects wild animals in their natural habitat, campaigns against the keeping of wild animals in captivity and rescues wild animals in need. It also promotes compassionate conservation, which takes into account the welfare of individual animals in conservation initiatives. Born Free also creates and provides educational materials and activities that reflect the charity's values.
The Phoenix Zoo opened in 1962 and is the largest privately owned, non-profit zoo in the United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the zoo was founded by Robert Maytag, a member of the Maytag family, and operates on 125 acres (51 ha) of land in the Papago Park area of Phoenix. It has been designated as a Phoenix Point of Pride.
The Indianapolis Zoo is a 64-acre (26 ha) non-profit zoo, public aquarium, and botanical garden in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Incorporated in 1944, the Indianapolis Zoological Society established the first zoo at George Washington Park in 1964. The current zoo opened in 1988 at White River State Park near downtown Indianapolis. It is among the largest privately funded zoos in the U.S.
The Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium is a zoo and aquarium in the United States, one of only six major zoo and aquarium hybrids in the United States. Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Highland Park, the zoo sits on 77 acres (31 ha) of park land where it exhibits more than 4,000 animals representing 475 species, including 20 threatened or endangered species.
Seoul Grand Park (Korean: 서울대공원) or Gwacheon Seoul Grand Park (과천서울대공원) is a park complex to the south of Seoul, South Korea, in the city of Gwacheon. Opened on May 1 in 1984.
The Duisburg Zoo, founded on 12 May 1934, is one of the largest zoological gardens in Germany. It is especially well known for its dolphinarium and, since 1994, for breeding koalas.
Elephant cognition is animal cognition as present in elephants. Most contemporary ethologists view the elephant as one of the world's most intelligent animals. With a mass of just over 5 kg (11 lb), an elephant's brain has more mass than that of any other land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twenty times those of a typical elephant, a whale's brain is barely twice the mass of an elephant's brain. In addition, elephants have around 257 billion neurons. Elephant brains are similar to humans and many other mammals in terms of general connectivity and functional areas, with several unique structural differences. Although initially estimated to have as many neurons as a human brain, the elephant's brain has about three times the amount of neurons as a human brain. However, the elephant's cerebral cortex has about one-third of the number of neurons as a human's cerebral cortex.
Monkey Day is an unofficial international holiday celebrated on December 14. The holiday was created and popularized in 2000 by controversial artists Casey Sorrow and Eric Millikin when they were art students at Michigan State University. Monkey Day celebrates monkeys and "all things simian", including other non-human primates such as apes, tarsiers, and lemurs. Monkey Day is celebrated worldwide and often also known as World Monkey Day and International Monkey Day.
Painting is a visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.
In art, appropriation is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts. In the visual arts, "to appropriate" means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects of human-made visual culture. Notable in this respect are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp.
Between 2011 and 2018, a series of disputes took place about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British wildlife photographer David J. Slater. The disputes involved Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections that he holds the copyright, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the copyright should be assigned to the macaque.
Pockets Warhol is a capuchin monkey, and one of 24 residents at Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary near Sunderland, Ontario, Canada. Pockets came to media attention in 2011 when the sanctuary held a fundraiser featuring 40 paintings by the monkey.
The Ambadevi rock shelters are part of an extensive cave site, where the oldest yet known traces of human life in the central province of the Indian subcontinent were discovered. The site is located in the Satpura Range of the Gawilgarh Hills in Betul District of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, north of Dharul village in Amravati district of Maharashtra. Studies of various rock paintings and petroglyphs present in the caves suggest, that the Ambadevi rock shelters were inhabited by prehistoric human settlers since around 25,000 years ago. First discoveries of clusters of numerous rock shelters and caves were made by Vijay Ingole and his team beginning on 27 January 2007. Named after the nearby ancient Ambadevi Cave Temple, the site has also been referred to as the Satpura-Tapti valley caves and the Gavilgarh-Betul rock shelters. The Ambadevi rock shelters rank among the most important archaeological discoveries of the early 21st Century in India, on par with the 20th Century discovery of the Bhimbetka rock shelters.
Pigcasso was a 700-kilogram (1,500 lb) painting pig from South Africa whose paintings have sold for millions of rand all over the world. Pigcasso is best known for being the first non-human artist to host her own art exhibition and holding the record for most expensive artwork ever sold by an animal. She is also famous for collaborating with the watchmaker Swatch to design its 2019 limited-edition Flying Pig timepiece. More broadly, she was known for inspiring conversations around veganism, vegetarianism, and factory farming.
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Bini in front of his artwork
Beluga whale painting
Et le soleil s'endormit sur l'Adriatique (Sunset Over the Adriatic), 54 × 81 cm, painting partially made by donkey (Lolo) assisted by Roland Dorgelès.
