The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human EvolutionThe 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. |
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achievement adaptations aesthetic America's Most Wanted ancestors animals argues Aristotle art form Arthur Danto artifact artistic audience Baule beauty capacity Carroll carvings chapter claim colors complex concept Cosmides created creative criteria criticism cross-cultural cultural Danto Darwin Darwinian Duchamp emotions evolution evolutionary evolutionary psychology evolved experience explain expression fact fakes feeling female fiction forgery Fountain function Hebborn human nature idea imaginative individual innate instinct intellectual intention interest intuitions Joyce Hatto Kant kitsch Komar and Melamid landscape language literature mate meaning Meegeren mental modern moral narrative natural selection Noël Carroll objects orgasm original painting philosophical Pinker play pleasure Pleistocene preferences prehistoric produced psychology readymades savannas sculptures sense Sepik sexual selection skill smell social spandrels species Steven Pinker story storytelling survival tastes theorists theory tion Tooby traditions tribal tribes understanding University Vermeer Westermarck effect women York Yoruba