Siri's drawings won praise as soon as other artists saw them. Willem de Kooning, a famous painter, said, They had a kind of flair!) and decisiveness and originality. Jerome Witkin, an art expert and professor, said, This drawing indicates a grasp of the essential mark that makes the emotion.↵
Who was Siri, this remarkable new artist? Witkin guessed from her drawings that she was female and interested in Asian decorative lettering. What he did not know was that she was eight feet tall and weighed four tons. Siri was an Asian elephant who drew by holding a pencil in her trunk.↵
Actually, Siri wasn't extraordinary by elephant standards. Wild elephants often use their trunks to make drawing motions in the dust. Captive elephants often scratch marks on the ground using a stick or stone. A captive elephant named Carol made paintings that sold for hundreds of dollars and ended up on the walls of many doctors' and lawyers' offices.↵
Supposedly, art is the noblest unique human trait. It sets us apart from animals at least as much as language does. Language, however, serves a useful purpose, but art has no obvious function. Its origins are considered a sublime mystery.↵
There are huge differences between Siri's art and the work of human artists. (For one thing, Siri wasn't trying to communicate her message to other elephants.) Still, it's a similar physical activity that creates products that even experts can't tell from human artistic productions. And the artlike activities of animals such as elephants may help us understand how human art originally functioned.