ESSAY text by JEFF RIAN artwork by MARTINE SYMS Everyone loves art and, well, makes some version of it. Anything treated with reverence and care — to make tea, customize a car, iron a shirt, or correct someone’s mistakes — is an artistic act. You might not think it’s art, but such an act is the closest thing to love — affection, attraction, benevolence, tenderness, and enthusiasm — without genital contact. Art and love are mind-body experiences. Each engages desire, affect, correction, and surprise. Why, after all, do we even have art? Why do we have love, for that matter? Maybe they’re related. In The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, Denis Dutton described art as a survival mechanism that evolved in the same way that fear or fingers or sight did. What made us different from the other members of our ape species is that we are “language-users,”…