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April 26, 2009
In his recent The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution book Denis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and Literature and Arts and Letters Daily, argues that art is not only a cultural phenomenon, but a natural one as well.
Like language art is in our genes in the sense that the arts are grounded in “a universal human nature”, and that only an evolutionary account, a “Darwinian” aesthetics, can explain their origins, their features, and their significance. This is a universalist theory of art that is opposed to the view that art is socially constructed and culture specific. For Dutton this ideology means that everybody's living in his or her own socially constructed, hermetically sealed, special cultural world.
The general argument is that since habitat choice was a life-and-death matter for early hunter-gatherers, human beings became innately sensitive to certain qualities of habitable landscape. Those who lacked this sensitivity were less likely to survive long enough to reproduce and, even if they did, their offspring might not have fared well. Factors such as the presence of water, lush foliage (and perhaps even climbable trees) were not merely aesthetic choices.
Dutton’s thesis is that universal features of our appreciation of landscape—our landscape aesthetic—were formed in this evolutionary environment As he puts it, “we are what we are today because our primordial ancestors followed paths and riverbanks over the horizon.” And painters, he suggests, have devised ways of triggering the pleasurable responses that arise from such evolved adaptations.
Thus artistic activity is itself adaptive—an inherited feature that increases our chances of survival and reproduction — and not, as Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker claim (although Pinker
makes an exception for fiction), a mere byproduct of adaptations important for other, independent reasons. Alexander Nehamas in The American Scholar describes Dutton's argument thus:
Dutton attributes, for example, three distinct adaptive advantages to fiction: it encourages counterfactual thinking, allowing us to react more flexibly to novel situations; it advances the exploration of different points of view, providing a better understanding of others and guidelines for social behavior; and it supplies factual information. A source of knowledge and a honing of the imagination and the emotions, fiction is a product of natural selection.
I find Dutton’s naturalism fair enough in that art does need to be connected with an evolved human nature This aspect of a “Darwinian” aesthetics is reasonable and acceptable, and it can be linked to Nietzsche's naturalist understanding of will to power.
What is problematic in The Art Instinct is the art-critical agenda which involves an attack on modernism, in which Dutton argues that modernism represents a wrong pathway (ugliness), and that Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values. Idf modernism was the wrong path, then postmodernism represents a dead end.
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Have you also noticed who Dutton hangs out with?
Essentially those on the right of the culture wars -- the right wing think tanks.
Not much Beauty to found there!
By contrast this reference gives a unique understanding of what inspired the early modernist painters up until World War Two---and a few exceptional individuals since.
http://www.artandphysics.com
They were trying to break the deadly trance/trap of Victorian materialism.
The same trance/trap that "informs" the world-view that ALL of those on the right loudly champion (although they quite often pretend otherwise).