These same Asian elephants in Thailand can paint various other works of flowers, trees, etc. Now, clearly elephants have no 'everyday use' for this nor likely have any innate instinct to create such a thing, so why would they do this? One may argue it is simply because the elephants are taught to do this for a commercial purpose; but what if, with no audience present, the elephant, having found prior pleasure from painting--pleasure we as humans may not be able to understand because we are not on the same conscious level as elephants--were to pick up the brush and create...would this be a work of artistic aesthetic? The "artistic" would come out on the physical piece of paper through employment of the physical objects of the brush and the paint; and the "aesthetic" would enter the picture when the elephant finds pleasure in his finished work, and later--perhaps the next morning--when the elephants' caretakers awoke to find this awe-arousing creation.
In my opinion, animals certainly have the ability to make art; it is just that, like with humans, they hold varying levels of artistic talent and create works considered to be art when they learn or are taught how to reach their full artistic potential.
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