Art is for signaling status, intelligence, skill, VALUE (sexual selection theory); to get a better partner to reproduce, those who are able to signal more effectively, obtained superior partners and reproduced.
Art is like a tool then, a means to an end. Similar to how sex is a means for reproduction. Sex has to be pleasurable because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t reproduce and our species would have gone extinct.
To rephrase, the proximate reason to engage in sex now is pleasure. The ultimate reason is to reproduce and make babies. Most of time now, we engage in sex primarily to feel pleasure, not to reproduce. Similarly, now we engage in art primarily because intrinsically it is a pleasurable activity. The proximate reason is pleasure. The ultimate reason is to signal and to obtain a superior mate.
Another example is buying a book to increase your vocabulary:
...It’s a mistake to suggest that everyone today who walks out of a bookshop with a guide to a bigger vocabulary is somehow on the make with a potential sexual partner (or even trying to ascend a career ladder with a display of verbal sophistication). Forget about sex for a minute: knowing what words mean in ever larger numbers makes it possible to read with greater comprehension and hence more enjoyment; that’s a good in and of itself. Even if the origin of the propensity is sexual, it may well be that neither the motivation nor the function is sexual for the person who today tries to learn more words. Exercising this capacity presents itself as an intrinsic pleasure without the slightest present connection to sex, except in human prehistory.
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