In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Steven Pinker writes:

“Art is in our nature…in the brain and in the genes….Though the exact forms of art vary widely across cultures, the activities of making and appreciating art are recognizable everywhere. The philosopher Denis Dutton has identified seven universal signatures:

1. Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2. Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art’s sake, and don’t demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
3. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
4. Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
5. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
6. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
7. Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theatre of the imagination.

The psychological roots of these activities have become a topic of recent research and debate. Some researchers, such as the scholar Ellen Dissanayaki, believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the ability to see in depth. Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends. On this view art is a pleasure technology, like drugs, erotica, or fine cuisine—a way to purify and concentrate pleasurable stimuli and deliver them to our senses. For the discussion in this chapter it does not matter which view is correct. Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties.” [There follow, some of the roots.] 404-405

References: Dutton, Aesthetic universals, in The Routledge companion to aesthetics, 2001; Dissanayaki, Homo aestheticus: Where art comes from and why, Free Press 1992, and Art and intimacy: How the arts began, U of Washington 2000; Pinker, How the mind works, Norton 1997.