Art is primarily a display of skill, not an aesthetic experience

Art is primarily a statement about the artist. The work proves skill, effort, and creative ability — it demonstrates that the artist has resources to spare on non-survival activities.

This explains several puzzles. We care enormously about whether a work was easy or hard to make: a painting copied from a photograph feels less valuable than one painted freehand, even if they're visually identical. Constraints in art forms — strict meter and rhyme in poetry, marble instead of clay in sculpture — exist because they make underlying talent visible by raising the difficulty. We value originality over derivative work because originality is harder, so it's a stronger signal.

The seashell test crystallizes it: if an artist found a beautiful shell on the beach, it's decoration. If she chiseled it from marble herself, it's art. The physical object is the same. What changes is the inference about the artist's effort and skill. We're not judging the object — we're judging what it proves about the person who made it.

What we think we're judging	What we're actually judging
Beauty or sensory quality	How hard the work was to make
Artistic merit	Artist's skill, effort, and creativity
Originality	Difficulty of replication
Craftsmanship	Strength of the fitness signal

Source claim: Art's value is largely a signal of the artist's ability — the same object is judged as more valuable the harder it was to make.