The Art Instinct
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Walter Benjamin echoed Malraux in believing aesthetics was a comparatively recent invention, a view proven wrong in the late 1970s, when Abraham Moles (Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique, 1973) and Frieder Nake (Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung, 1974) analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. Dennis Dutton in The Art Instinct also proposed that an aesthetic sense was a vital evolutionary factor." --Sholem Stein “The evolution of Homo sapiens in the past million years is not just a history of how we came to have acute color vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait. It is also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and enrapture ourselves, from children’s games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens” (2-‐3). |
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The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (2009) is a book by Denis Dutton.
Blurb:
- The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed." The human appreciation for art is innate, and certain artistic values are universal across cultures, such as a preference for landscapes that, like the ancient savannah, feature water and distant trees. If people from Africa to Alaska prefer images that would have appealed to our hominid ancestors, what does that mean for the entire discipline of art history? Dutton argues, with forceful logic and hard evidence, that art criticism needs to be premised on an understanding of evolution, not on abstract "theory." Sure to provoke discussion in scientific circles and an uproar in the art world, The Art Instinct offers radical new insights into both the nature of art and the workings of the human mind.
See also
- Aesthetics
- Darwinian literary studies
- Matthen, Mohan, 2011, “Art, Sexual Selection, Group Selection: Critical Notice of The Art Instinct”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 41: 337–356.
