Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (McLellan Books) [Hardcover]

Ellen Dissanayake (Author)

Book Description

Series: McLellan Books | Publication Date: April 2000

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In "Art and Intimacy", she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love. It all begins with the human trait of birthing immature and helpless infants. To ensure that mothers find their demanding babies worth caring for, humans evolved to be loveable and to attune themselves to others from the moment of birth. The ways in which mother and infant respond to each other are rhythmically patterned vocalisations and exaggerated face and body movements that Dissanayake calls rhythms and sensory modes. Rhythms and modes also give rise to the arts. Because humans are born predisposed to respond to and use rhythmic-modal signals, societies everywhere have elaborated them further as music, mime, dance, and display, in rituals which instil and reinforce valued cultural beliefs. Just as rhythms and modes co-ordinate and unify the mother-infant pair, in ceremonies they co-ordinate and unify members of a group. Today, we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity, and fecundity, that affected their survival. Now, we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in artlike behaviour, then we actually need the arts. Even - or perhaps especially - in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things. Ellen Dissanayake has recently held Distinguished Visiting Professorships in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. She has lectured and taught in a variety of settings, including the New School for Social Research in New York City, the National Arts School in Papua New Guinea, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She is the author of "Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why and What Is Art For?"

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest from Dissanayake (Homo Aestheticus; What Is Art For?) pursues two grand and simultaneous goals: the first is to show that aesthetic experience in all its variety (viewing paintings, playing concerti, observing sunsets, etc.) shares basic features with experiences we call "love"--whether parental, fraternal or romantic. The second is to place these features within a theory of natural selection as it worked on primates and early hominids. For Dissanayake, love and art minister to a "hierarchy of needs" that recall the terminology of mid-century psychology. The first term of the hierarchy ("mutuality") has its prototype in the bond between parent and infant; the last ("elaborating") explains why we sometimes want art for art's sake. The superb first chapter synthesizes studies of mother-infant bonding in people, chimps and apes, and rebukes other "evolutionary psychologists" who attend to how babies get made, but not to what happens after they're born. "Elaborating" in premodern societies, Dissanayake contends, took place most often through communal ceremonies; today, we find this sort of satisfaction primarily in sex or in works of art--one reason why society, and government, ought to be "taking the arts seriously." Provocative if not always convincing, Dissanayake knows she hasn't produced a fully fledged philosophical aesthetics and avoids the strident determinisms that often afflict "evolutionary psychology." The weakest parts of her book trail off into cultural jeremiads: video games are (surprise!) bad, handicrafts good. But the strongest elements bring welcome information from the social and natural sciences to readers who think, or want to think, about art in general. (July)

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

... compelling rationales for the value of art in society. Strongly recommended . . . [A] valuable resource for all art educators. -- School Arts (June 2001) Kent Anderson

...a deep and even moving investigation of art's capacity to touch every corner of our emotional lives. -- Washington Post Book Review (Dec. 3, 2000). Denis Dutton

...a major work of cultural analysis. ...will invigorate the study of art for many years to come. -- Philosophy and Literature 25: 155-165 (2001), Nancy Easterlin

...skillfully integrates at least fourteen disciplinary sources in a readable text appropriate for . . an educated general readership. -- Religious Studies Review 27:4 (October 2001).

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 265 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295979119
• ISBN-13: 978-0295979113
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #229,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Consilience and 'the art of making special', February 4, 2001

By 

Cheryl (Surrey BC CANADA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (McLellan Books) (Hardcover)

I read Ellen Dissanayake's previous 2 books and found this current publication a little disappointing in comparison. She has developed a philosophy of the arts called 'consilience' based on her Darwinian (biosocial) perspective which unifies biological and cultural viewpoints. The chapters cover her theory of mother/infant mutuality, the need to belong to a group, finding meaning, hands-on competence (making things), and elaboration (making special) as they pertain to the evolution of the arts in human development. My concern is mainly focussed on her ideas of a 'Naturalistic Aesthetics' found in the appendix. She aims to emcompass all the arts (music, dance, drama, visual arts) in developing criteria for assigning aesthetic quality to the artistic process (or is it product??) but fails to convince me that these criteria span all of the arts. For instance, the criteria 'strikingness' is something I would attribute to visual arts but certainly not music where the visual component is not a sense priority. She rightly claims that the meaning of aesthetics is currently fraught with ambiguity in its association with the definition of 'beauty'. Beauty, to me, is highly subjective and not necessarily a universal characteristic amongst all cultural groups. I feel until 'aesthetics' is properly redefined (possibly as 'the power to communicate emotion and value systems') we as arts educators looking for philosophies to give us direction, will continue to beat down the wrong garden path. I can only hope that Dissanayake will receive enough constructive feedback from scholars of other arts disciplines so that she can round out her philosophical viewpoint.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book of Great Beauty and Vast Riches, December 4, 2002

By 

G. B. Talovich (Wulai, Taiwan, ROC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (McLellan Books) (Hardcover)

I have been trying for some time to write a review of this book. I give up: I simply cannot do it justice in 1,000 words or less. The book is not flawless, but in the two years since I first read it, I have come back to it again and again, always learning something. It took a long time to read in the first place, because every few pages I would run into an idea that required a few days' thought.

The book is illustrated with wonderful photos. Nobody can look at those babies in Chapter 1 without smiling, thus proving Dissanayake's points. My particular favorite is the little girl in Sudan absorbed in her drawing (p197). Some photos I wish had been bigger. The mbari house on page 153 is barely distinguishable.

Anybody interested in human affairs will benefit from this book. Even those outside human concerns should read it, simply to see how perceptive and stimulating the ideas are.