The Art Instinct  

"In linguistics, Benjamin Lee Whorf persuaded many people that different languages imposed radically different mental worlds on their speakers. Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) convinced generations of college students that epochs in science were so intellectually sealed off [...] Under the shadow of writers such as Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, young ethnographers were expected to return from fieldwork arguing that the worldviews and values of their tribes were unique, special, and not comparable to those of Western culture." --p.10

"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).

"Too many disputes in art theory tiresomely rehash the artistic status of amusing modernist provocations, such Andy Warhol's signed soup cans or John Cage's sitting at a piano with a stopwatch. We need first to focus on what makes La Grande Jatte or Anna Karenina or the Chrysler Building art." --The Art Instinct p.4 [...] "Aesthetics today finds itself in a paradoxical, not to say bizarre, situation. On the one hand, scholars and theorists have access - in libraries, in museums, on the Internet, firsthand via travel - to a wider perspective on artistic creation across cultures and through history than ever before. . . Against this glorious availability, how odd that philosophical speculation about art has been inclined towards endless analysis of an infinitesimal class of cases, prominently featuring Duchamp's readymades or boundary-testing objects such as Sherrie Levine's appropriated photographs and John Cage's 4' 33". [...] If you wish to understand the essential nature of murder, you do not begin with a discussion of something complicated or emotionally loaded, such as assisted suicide or abortion or capital punishment. Assisted suicide may or may not be murder, but determining whether such disputed cases are murder requires first that we are clear on the nature and logic of indisputable cases; we move from the uncontroversial center to the disputed remote territories. The same principle holds in aesthetic theory." --The Art Instinct p.50