The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Dutton, an aesthetic philosopher best known as the curator of the Web site Arts & Letters Daily, sets out to do for art what Steven Pinker and others have done for psychology, language, and religion: consider it from a Darwinian standpoint. Along the way, he gives an engaging, if opinionated, survey of various currents in aesthetic debate; it is perhaps unavoidable that he seems on more solid foundations here than in the realm of science. When trying to assess whether artistic impulses should be considered adaptive or merely by-products of the evolutionary process, a crucial question raised by his approach, he argues by analogy and tries to have it both ways. But the book is ultimately animated less by its grand thesis than by all the questions tossed up along the way�why did no art form develop to exploit smell, as music does hearing?�and by Dutton�s infectious and wide-ranging love of art, a passion that clearly goes beyond anything that could be considered an adaptive trait.
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonah Lehrer The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America -- is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders. Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct, people the world over are weirdly driven to create beautiful things. These aesthetic objects are utterly useless -- W.H. Auden pointed out that they make "nothing happen" -- and yet we enshrine them in climate-controlled museums and pay millions of dollars for a silkscreen of a soup can. What began with a few horses on the walls of a French cave has blossomed into a human obsession. The premise of Dutton's work is that this instinct for art isn't an accident. Instead, he argues that our desire for beauty is firmly grounded in evolution, a side effect of the struggle to survive and reproduce. In this sense, a cubist painting by Picasso is no more mysterious than the allure of a Playboy centerfold: Both are works of culture that attempt to sate a biological drive. Dutton frames his argument as a scientific response to the idea that art is a "social construction," driven by the fads of society. He begins the book by describing a series of paintings by the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in the early 1990s surveyed people in 10 countries on their preferences regarding color, subject matter and painterly style. These poll results were then distilled into a series of realist landscapes. The American painting, for instance, featured a foreground of sun-dappled grass, a lake, a few adorable children and the figure of George Washington. It's an absurd pastiche, the visual equivalent of combining all of America's favorite foods in the same dish. We might enjoy pizza and ice cream, but that doesn't mean we want pizza-flavored ice cream. While Dutton appreciates the irony of Komar and Melamid, he's more intrigued by the striking similarity of their paintings. Although the 10 national landscapes differed in their details -- the Russians wanted a brown bear, while the Kenyans preferred a hippo -- the basic layout was identical. In each case, people craved a painting that featured a large body of blue water, some open grass, a human figure and a few animals. Why the cross-cultural similarity? According to Dutton, the survey results reveal our hard-wired preferences, which developed when we were Pleistocene hunter-gatherers roaming the African savannah. The landscapes we find most beautiful are simply those from which we evolved. If we like paintings with a foreground of short grasses, it's because that habitat contains more protein per square mile than any other, which is a crucial perk for a meat-eating primate. There's an alluring logic to such arguments, which promise to rescue aesthetics from the fog of post-modernist theory. Who needs Jacques Derrida when there's evolutionary psychology? Why talk about "texts" when we can talk about "genes"? Like Steven Pinker, whose writing inspires much of The Art Instinct, Dutton reserves his harshest criticisms for the modernists, whom he holds responsible for things like "pure abstraction in painting, atonality in music, random word-order poetry, Finnegans Wake, and readymades," such as the upside-down urinal made famous by Marcel Duchamp. Such unpleasant works of art are inspired, Dutton says, by a "blank-slate view of culture," which assumes that the mind can learn to appreciate just about anything. As a result, modern artists have delighted in being difficult: They've given us works of abstraction when all we really wanted was a grassy landscape with an eminent figure such as George Washington. The problem with such "evolutionary aesthetics" is that, in the end, they excel at explaining kitsch. Our Pleistocene preferences might justify the work of Komar and Melamid, or the neo-impressionist art of "painter of light" Thomas Kinkade, but when everything in the Museum of Modern Art violates your theory of aesthetics, then it might be worth revising the theory. Just because the laws of human nature as presently understood can't explain the allure of Mark Rothko doesn't mean we should stop looking at his paintings. It just means we don't understand human nature very well. Dutton is also interested in the origins of the art instinct. Shouldn't those cave-dwellers have been busy hunting instead of drawing on the wall? Why do we squander so much time and energy on art? Dutton has two distinct theories. The first is that fictional narratives, from the Iliad to "The Sopranos," provide people with a "low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience." Because I watch HBO, I'll be prepared the next time I'm in New Jersey. His second explanation, which leans heavily on the work of Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, involves sexual selection. Like Miller, he sees the arts as a tool of seduction, an intellectual version of the peacock's tail. Consider poetry, which for Dutton is little more than a way of showing off to potential mates. (He cites Cyrano de Bergerac as an example of poetic courtship, although he fails to note that Cyrano doesn't get the girl. His eloquent genes are never passed on.) According to Dutton, this process of mate selection -- chicks dig big vocabularies -- is responsible for the propagation of genes that lead to "the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality," including artistic expression. On the one hand, this explanation of art is just common sense. It doesn't take an evolutionary psychologist to know that a lot of poetry is written to impress the opposite sex, or that Lord Byron and Elvis Presley seldom slept alone. However, arguing that the sex lives of poets explains the origins of poetry makes about as much sense as using the bedroom exploits of Wilt Chamberlain to construct a biological explanation of basketball. Yes, poets have sex, perhaps even more sex than normal. That still doesn't explain Shakespeare. Dutton is an elegant writer, and his book should be admired for its attempt to close the gap between art and science. It really is time that art critics learn about the visual cortex, musicologists study the inner ear and evolutionary psychologists unpack Jane Austen. Unfortunately, like so many other aesthetic theories, Dutton's ideas are ultimately undone by what they can't explain. This is the irony of evolutionary aesthetics: Although it sets out to solve the mystery of art, to explain why people write poems and smear paint on canvases, it ends up affirming the mystery. The most exquisite stuff is what we can't explain. That's why we call it art.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (December 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596914017
• ISBN-13: 978-1596914018
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #9,181 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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72 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What Evolutionary Explanlation Can There Be For Our Love of Art? , January 10, 2009

By	Kevin Currie-Knight "Education Grad Student" (Newark, Delaware) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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In "The Art Instinct," Denis Dutton asks an interesting question: is there a way to explain our human prediliction for art in evolutionary terms? How can this drive for art be seen as a trait instilled by the process of evolution? Dutton's answers, unfortunately, turn out to be rather pedestrian, in that he (a) borrows and does not add to the conclusions of others; and (b) focuses on "easy cases" of representative art as opposed ot cases that would be more problematic for his theory.

First, Dutton outlays his very pluralistic theory of what constitutes art. He makes very good arguments against the reigning culturally relativistic views (art is whatever we define it as). In its place, he offers twelve criteria that art must have in order to be art (none of which are necessary or sufficient on their own. They are:

(1) gives direct pleasure; (2)exhibits skill and virtuosity; (3) novelty and creativity; (4) style; (5) ability to evoke criticism; (6) representation; (7) special focus; (8) expressive individuality; (9) emotional saturation; (10) intellectually challenging; follows artistic traditions; (12) imaginitive experience.

Dutton writes that while none of these critiria are necessary or sufficient, anything that is to be classified as art must exhibit a greater or lesser degree of at least several of these traits. He certainly shows that even the most different cultural definitions of art all have at least these criteria in common, and more importantly, that, regardless of culture, we all have a human drive to admire things with these characteristics.

From here, Dutton's argument focuses on how to see art in evolutionary terms. While Dutton discount's Stephen Gould's assertion that art (and human culture) is best seen as an evolutionary byproduct (while language may be an evolutionary adaptation, love of poetry is a byproduct and has no adaptive value on its own). Dutton does little to argue out of this, only suggesting that by-products of adaptive traits should themselves be seen as adaptive. (?!)

He then goes on to borrow heavily from Steven Pinker in his explanation for how representative art could have served an evolutionary purpose. (Stories helped early humans learn information and acquire knoweldge of others' experiences. Admiration for landscape art stems from early humans' abillty to recognize and judge landscapes.) Dutton also borrows liberally from Geoffrey Miller's idea that art acquisition may have an advantage via sexual selection: like the peacock's tail, art may be a way of conveying to mates one's sophistication, affluence, and civility.

My biggest problem with these explanations is that they focus on the easy cases of representative art. Dutton dismisses 'dadaism' and abstract art as not really art, suggests that scents never developed into an art because they are not reperesentative in nature, and is at a complete loss to explain music as an art (other than to rehash Darwin's suggestion that love for music may stem from our affinity for language and bird songs.) And his discussion very unkowingly dismisses that fact that, attached to our love for art is a love for decoration and style in the sense of having nice looking things (bedsheets for instance). Very few of these fall within the purview of representative art, which leaves all of this outside the purview of Dutton's narrow theory.

Quite honestly, I was very unconvinced by this book. I am VERY symapathetic to Dutton's desire to find an evolutionary explanation for art, but do not dismiss as quickly as Dutton the 'byproduct' theory of Stephen Jay Gould and Jerry Fodor. The theories that Dutton does expound are all borrowed, namely from Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct) and Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind). Also, the application of his ideas is too narrow in its almost exclusive focus on representative art (leaving music, abstract visual art, and the human prediliction for "nice looking" non-represenative things untouched.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Basic Instinc, January 2, 2009

By	Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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Aesthetics certainly appears to be one of the more difficult branches of philosophy. How for example does one tackle such abstracts such as `beauty' or deal with concepts like perceptions of reality? Well in this quite interesting book Denis Dutton neatly sidesteps these issues. This book is based entirely on his premise that the capability to appreciate and create art in all of its forms is as integral to the human condition as language or social relationships (hence the title "The Art Instinct"). His premise is of course self evident, but only after it is articulated. Since Dutton is a professor of philosophy he does not take `self evident' as a supporting argument. Rather he devotes this book to marshaling carefully constructed arguments to prove his premise and, more interestingly, to refute the arguments of philosophers who have maintained that art is not an innate quality of man.

To this end Dutton even goes after Immanuel Kant, arguably the greatest idealist philosopher since Plato. He directs his argument against Kant to what is one of the weakest points in Kant's philosophical system, his understanding of aesthetic values. Dutton points out among other things that Kant may have had a literal blind spot for art.

A number of Dutton's arguments supporting his premise are not particularly strong, but all are interesting. He provides a fascinating perspective on aesthetic analysis and the question of what indeed constitutes art. To this reader's great relief he does so using straight forward, clear prose. He avoids the often obscure jargon and syntactical mazes so often found in modern philosophical writing. This quality along makes the book worth buying.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explaining Art Through Evolution, and Vice Versa, January 3, 2009

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Every culture we know of, every tribe, current or historic, tells stories. They all make music. They might not all do watercolors, but they all do some sort of representational art. Why is this? After all, storytelling, music, and painting are far less effective in putting food on the table than, say, hunting or planting. In examining a cultural universal, like making art, it makes sense to seek an answer from evolution. No one scientifically doubts that we have our bodies and physiology due to evolution (although religious doubters continue to pipe up). Over the past three decades, we have seen evolutionary explanations for human sexuality, language, even religion. Can Darwin's principles be applied to our diligence in making art, and our of love of art? Denis Dutton thinks so, and in _The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution_ (Bloomsbury Press), he has put forward a cogent and entertaining evolutionary explanation of our artistic impulses. Dutton, who teaches the philosophy of art, and also founded and edits the popular and useful website _Arts & Letters Daily_, has good grasps on art and evolution, and his explanations for artistic behavior and appreciation help us understand both disciplines.

If evolution explains art-making through all cultures, you'd expect some general agreement on, say, what paintings are beautiful. Statistics have been done, and it does seem that there is a consensus between cultures on what is the prettiest landscape. In the Pleistocene era, our ancestors were nomads. They would have liked the blue of water or of distant vegetation; it would have meant sustenance from good hunting grounds. Music is perhaps harder to explain. We need hearing as a way of understanding our surroundings, but the rhythmic, pitched sounds of music would seem to contribute nothing to survival ability. It may be that musical sounds helped the birth of language, and music with its associated dances may have helped with tribal cooperation and bonding. Stories, though, can have real and obvious survival advantages. Stories can convey facts; a fanciful folktale from the Yanomamo about jaguars, for instance, gives plenty of information and advice about how to live in an environment where jaguars are a threat. Fiction enables us to understand the mental experiences of others, not just of imagined characters, but of authors. Reading minds in this way is easily understood as having survival advantages for a social species like ourselves. Dutton believes that making art had origins as a display of skill that would lure prospective mates and intimidate potential rivals. Making art is an "extra", something that only a smart, vigorous individual could do, an individual that did not have to expend full resources on life's basics. Art is a fitness display.

The scope of these ideas allows Dutton to bring in many thought-provoking examples, and some of them are a real surprise. Marcel Duchamp's placing a urinal on a pedestal and calling it art almost a hundred years ago has been a subject of controversy ever since; yes, says, Dutton, it qualifies pretty well in the checklist he provides of the characteristics of artistic expression. Forgeries are a fascinating case; if they are so well done that they fool even the experts, they must have artistic merit, but why is it that we are offended by them? Dutton explains that evolution has destined us to expect and insist upon authenticity in art. He explains also why, when referring to a different culture, "They have a different concept of art from ours" is a vacuous conceit. He introduces us to various theorists within his own discipline, and openly takes many of them to task. This is a work written in a popular style, and those who enjoy the ideas of such popularizers as Stephen J. Gould or Steven Pinker will find some of those ideas nicely argued against. It might make some readers uncomfortable to consider that making art and appreciating art, characteristics that are among those that make humans unique, could be best explained by spirals of chromosomes. The artistic impulse will always remain mysterious; Dutton's examining it as instinct has brought forth a volume of intriguing thought experiments, philosophical puzzles, and ingenious speculation.