The Art Instinct  

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"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

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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.

Contents

ToC

Introduction

Landscape and longing

Art and human nature

"It is with good reason, says Sancho to the squire with the great nose, that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: This is a quality hereditary in our family. Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it; and, after mature reflection, pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom an old key with a leathern thong tied to it." --"Of the Standards of Taste", David Hume

What is art?

"But they don't have our concept of art"

Art and natural selection

The uses of fiction

"The experience of reading — or the auditory equivalent in the oral antecedents to literature — has some parallel with the experience of dreaming and also with the experience of «virtual reality» simulators. It is an experience of subjective absorption within an imaginary world, a world in which motives, situations,persons, and events operate dramatically, in narrative sequence. Unlike dreams, most literary works have a strong component of conscious conceptual order - a «thematic» order. But like dreams, and unlike other forms of conscious conceptual order - science, philosophy, scholarship - literature taps directly into the elemental response systems activated by emotion. Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral. This feature of literature is not incidental to its adaptive function." --Joseph Carroll

Art and human self-domestication

Intention, forgery, Dada : three aesthetic problems

The contingency of aesthetic values

Greatness in the arts

"let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art." --Art (1914)

See also




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