I am fairly certain that all that we understand as ‘art’ is the rarefied and thickly decorated remains of forms of active interbeing (communion) which we lost as our cultures became remade in the images of their cognitive and linguistic prostheses. In other words, this stuff is the decorative wrapper we now worship because thousands of years ago we began to forget how to become art, and so we began to make, conserve, trade, abstract, and reflect upon it. Each of the forms we see now are remnants of something magnificent which -we used to do together as an intimate necessities of coexistence-. Art was not an artifact of our cultural allegiances; and there were no words for it!

The reason there were no words is that semantic concepts did not there intrude. It was a way of being/becoming. It was not a speech act. What remains to us, now… are the overly decorated and bizarrely venerated skeletal remains. What art was, is dead to us. So we have the remains, and we trade them and identify with them. We worship the makers.

In Cameroon there live a people who all make what we call music. All the time. With incredibly difficult flute-like instruments. Yet, fascinatingly, they have no word for music.

They do it all the time and have no word for it.

See?