The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human EvolutionThe Dinka have a connoisseur's appreciation of the patterns and colours of the markings on their cattle. The Japanese tea ceremony is regarded as a performance art. Some cultures produce carving but no drawing; others specialize in poetry. Yet despite the rich variety of artistic expression to be found across many cultures, we all share a deep sense of aesthetic pleasure. The need to create art of some form is found in every human society.In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton explores the idea that this need has an evolutionary basis: how the feelings that we all share when we see a wonderful landscape or a beautiful sunset evolved as a useful adaptation in our hunter-gather ancestors, and have been passed on to us today, manifest in our artistic natures. Why do people indulge in displaying their artistic skills? How can we understand artistic genius? Why do we value art, and what is it for? These questions have long been asked by scholars in the humanities and in literature, but this is the first book to consider the biological basis of this deep human need.This sparking and intelligent book looks at these deep and fundamental questions, and combines the science of evolutionary psychology with aesthetics, to shed new light on longstanding questions about the nature of art. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Landscape and Longing | 13 |
2 Art and Human Nature | 29 |
3 What Is Art? | 47 |
4 But They Dont Have Our Concept of Art | 64 |
5 Art and Natural Selection | 85 |
6 The Uses of Fiction | 103 |
7 Art and Human SelfDomestication | 135 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
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 drama Duchamp emotions ence evolution evolutionary evolutionary psychology evolved example experience explain expression fact fakes feeling fiction forgery Fountain function Hebborn human nature hunter-gatherer idea imaginative individual innate intellectual intention interest intuitions Joyce Hatto Kant kind kitsch Komar and Melamid landscape language literature mate meaning Meegeren mental modern moral narrative natural selection objects painting performances 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 universal Vermeer Westermarck effect women Yoruba