Zoos make money selling paintings made by animals. Are they art?

Featured on washingtonpost.com

In 2005, three works of art by a relatively unknown artist sold for more than $25,000 at an elite auction house in London. That’s not a huge amount as art sales go, but it made headlines because the painter was hardly typical. The artist was an ape, and the amount was the largest ever paid for art by a nonhuman.

Zoos have since taken note. Art by animals sells.

Yes, that preposition is correct — art “by,” not “about,” animals. This unlikely yet widespread practice generates a modest ongoing source of income in U.S. zoos, dependent on paintings made by gorillas, elephants, sea lions, birds and even stingrays and snakes, all sold in zoo gift shops and online. There is even a wider transnational market for art made by animals, with dolphins painting in Lithuania, elephants painting in Thailand, and primates painting in Australia.

This phenomenon raises several intriguing questions: Are animals really artists? Do captive animals want to paint? Should you invest your savings in seal squiggles? And how in the world would you teach a gorilla to paint anyway?

Paintings by animals surged into the public imagination when the prominent British ethologist Desmond Morris featured Congo the chimpanzee on his television show “Zoo Time” in the 1950s. Congo, sitting in a high chair and grasping a paint brush, appeared to enjoy making marks on paper with tempera paint, and some of the abstract images were quite arresting. It was Congo’s works that U.S. collector Howard Hong paid thousands for in 2005.

Howard Rutkowski, the auction house’s modern art curator, was shocked: “We had no idea what these things were worth,” he said. “We just put them [on sale] for our own amusement.”

Congo was not the first primate to paint, just the first to become so famous for doing so. And his sweeping brushmarks sold in part because his timing was right: In the 1950s, the U.S. and European art worlds were just embracing the post-World War II gestural works of abstract expressionist painters like Robert Motherwell.

Click here to read the full article.