Pythagorean said:
yes, I knew about he bowerbird (and peacocks and cuttle fish) when I posted. I don't mind including music in art (it's the only art I can do, after all) but it seemed to me like this thread was about visual art.
I don't think the bowerbird or the peacock or the cuttle fish have a very similar thing happening as when we see a piece of an art in a museum (or even sitting at home, on the internet, or listening in our car to music).
I think that limiting this to visual art is a mistake. I do not see any reason to believe that the responses involved in the appreciation of a fine piece of music is much different than the responses involved in appreciating a fine painting. If you know of any reason to believe otherwise then please let me know.
As for the bower bird I am unsure why you are mentioning peacocks and cuddlefish. I bring up bower birds, and they are brought up in the paper, because they actually
create the object which attracts their mate. It is a thing outside and separate from themselves. That is why it is similar to paintings and the like. Their mate is attracted to an
object. It apparently finds the
object aesthetically pleasing. The theory is that the amount of time, effort, and cleverness required to build an aesthetically pleasing bower, above and beyond that required to merely survive, is a good indicator of fitness. So if a female bower bird finds herself a really nice bower she has likely also found herself a fit mate.
If your issue is a lack of sexual context when you are in a museum or your living room looking at a painting I would say that the sexual context is irrelevant. I noted earlier that nice hair, teeth, and skin are common sexual selection characteristics. We are attracted to these things though the average person does not sexualize teeth and hair and skin. The average person (and animal) is attracted to these things in any context. They are also gender neutral. We are attracted to these things regardless of the gender of the person who possesses them. So it seems that sexual context is irrelevant to a sexual selection characteristic.
Quite simply, unless we have good reason or evidence, trying to come up with evolutionary reasons for human traits leads to (as you are demonstrating) very human-centric predictions. That your fat, ugly friend can score because he's a musician has no basis in evolutionary science: it's an anecdote, a novelty. It's not surprising, but it's also clearly not the norm.
I am unsure how my "predictions" are "human-centric". And my note about my friend was an aside. I found it funny in the context of the discussion. I also am not sure that it is "clearly not the norm". Though there has not been a scientific study that I am aware of the bulk of anecdotal evidence supports the idea that persons are highly attracted to singers and musicians.
You need really good evidence to talk about evolutionary purpose (which really has nothing to do with 'purpose' and is actually a postdictive statement about what traits were successful, as you said yourself). You can't claim a trait is successful just because it developed and is still around, the chin isn't "successful" as far as we know. It just is.
Now when you start talking about the mind in the context of evolution, you're talking about the wobbly portion of evolutionary psychology, which has a lot of reasonable criticisms launched at it from people like Gary Marcus (see Kluge).
The evidence is primarily in the correlation of data. Of course correlation is not causation but that is pretty much all we have. In the case of sexual selection characteristics high correlation of a trait with reproductive success and fitness is what it is all about.
If you think about an experiment you can do to prove the claim in the first place (or know of an experiment already done) I'd like to hear about it. It's easy to figure out what genes code for a particular functional protein but even pondering the genetics of mental events is already extremely difficult and requires at least some experience with the indirect approach of bioinformatics to even playfully bat at.
Did you read the paper I linked?
The fitness indicator view of aesthetic judgement and artistic production is, like most real mid-level hypotheses in evolutionary psychology, eminently testable (see Ketelaar & Ellis, 1999). Indeed, one major advantage is that it can be tested using many of the same empirical methods that have already been used in animal comunication research (see e.g. Andersson, 1994; Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 1998; Catchpole & Slater, 1995; Johnstone, 1995). The hypothesis that a behavioral trait has evolved through sexual selection as a fitness indicator leads to the 34 predictions below. They are generic to fitness indicators, but in the context of this paper on the visual arts, the ‘trait’ would be art production ability (presumably controlling for instruction and practice), and the ‘mate choice criterion’ would be aesthetic value-judgments about artistic merit. Not all 34 predictions need be supported for the hypothesis to hold true, but the more the better. For a fuller explanation of how these predications relate to the theory, see Miller (2000a,b,c,d).
Following that is the mentioned list of predictions.
The reaction depends on the woman and the landscape. And arousal is generally not a reaction (a benefit of age 
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