This essay uses the bowerbird's practice of collecting and arranging decorative objects to attract a mate as a point of departure to question the humanist commitments of art history as a discipline, and to explore what establishing a posthumanist art history might involve. I look to Charles Darwin's concept of sexual selection and the questions that it raised regarding the evolutionary origins of human creative activity. I discuss early natural history illustrations of bowerbirds along with Darwinian anthropologies of art, which bring human and avian aesthetic practices into dialogue. Finally, I draw on Richard Prum's theories on aesthetic evolution, Elizabeth Grosz's posthumanist perspective on art's origins, the emerging discipline of multispecies ethnography, and Indigenous Papuan understandings of the bowerbird, to ask how art historians might begin to restore human animals to a larger ecology of creative beings.

中文翻译：

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鸟类的美感：对凉亭鸟的后人类主义视角

本文以园丁鸟收集和布置装饰物以吸引配偶的做法为出发点，质疑艺术史作为一门学科的人文主义承诺，并探讨建立后人文主义艺术史可能涉及的内容。我着眼于查尔斯达尔文的性选择概念以及它提出的关于人类创造性活动的进化起源的问题。我讨论园丁鸟的早期自然历史插图以及达尔文的艺术人类学，它们将人类和鸟类的审美实践带入对话。最后，我借鉴了理查德·普鲁姆关于审美进化的理论、伊丽莎白·格罗斯对艺术起源的后人类主义观点、新兴的多物种民族志学科以及巴布亚土著对园丁鸟的理解，