Is there an evolutionary value to the creative arts?

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I've been interested in this question for a while, and I've asked this question to both musicians, visual artists, and non-artists.

Here's the interesting thing. If you ask an evolutionary biologist who has not personally practiced any kind of artistic activity, they will say something along the lines of:

Playing an instrument is an honest signal that displays cognitive ability and both mental and physical agility. People who are good at playing instruments are admired by others and gain social status. There is also some sexual selection going on, because it also serves as a sign of good genes.

Here's the response from an actual professional virtuoso violinist who has no training in biology:

Music allows you to communicate your emotions.

Notice how the musician did not mention anything about playing accurate rhythms, or advanced cognitive ability. As a musician, I can certainly agree that if you can play alot of fast notes, people find that admirable. What the scientist's theory doesn't explain is that there are plenty of works of art that are actually quite simple and yet people still find them aesthetically pleasing. When I used to do piano competitions, it was the person who was the most expressive who always won, even if he/she may have made a few minor technical mistakes. If your technique is flawless but if you fail to express yourself, you're the one who is getting 2nd place. This leads me to believe that humans are drawn to artists who have the strongest ability to communicate on a purely visceral level.

You can sort of imagine a scenario maybe over 200,000 years ago, maybe even before we had what we'd recognize as "speech," that those first humans communicated their internal state in a purely nonverbal medium. If you're a social animal like a human, your reproductive ability and subsequent evolutionary success depends on your ability to efficiently communicate to your group. Afterall, humans would not reproduce very successfully if we were all sequestered away in our private worlds.

There is truth in what the scientist hypothesizes about sexual and natural selection, but I believe the primary root of the selection has to do with communication. And yes, it's totally plausible that a trait can serve more than one adaptive purpose, or that an adaptive trait can change functions as a species persists through time. I like to think of speech as a more recently-developed derivative of nonverbal media.

Anyway, that's what I think. I'd like to know your opinions. Why does society value artistic creation? What adaptive value does it serve? Do you think nonverbal art came before speech?

I don't give a damn about practicality. Why must everything have a practical reason?