January 11, 2009
Our Inner Artist: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
From The Washington Post:
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.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 09:36 AM | Permalink
Comments
It also appears that the thesis here may involve seeing a relationship between the appreciation of nature and the human response to art. Certainly our earliest esthetic responses would have been to natural beauty.
Posted by: Paul Maurice Martin | Jan 11, 2009 10:37:50 AM
What follows is an excellent example of the adaptive advantages that art confers certain species.
While examining a painting done by a recently introduced artist, Willem de Kooning (recognized authority on expressionistic art) stated: “These drawings have an innate tendency towards plastic originality”. While Jerome Witkin, another authority on the matter said “These paintings are very lyric, very precious. These productions are so very delicate and harmonious, that give indication that the artist has a basic and substantial understanding of the most profound of human emotions.”
Both critics further suggested that the artist had a better than average understanding of Asiatic calligraphy.
Siri was the name of the artist. Eight foot tall, four tons in weight and she only used a pencil when drawing with her trunk, as she was an elephant captive at the Amsterdam Zoo.
Well?
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | Jan 11, 2009 5:21:38 PM
Felix,
What did Siri say when she heard about these?
Posted by: MS | Jan 11, 2009 7:31:35 PM
he argues that our desire for beauty is firmly grounded in evolution, a side effect of the struggle to survive and reproduce.
A bold and original thesis.
Interesting that the 3QD summary has left out the actual critical response contained in the linked article, which correctly shows the book's main line of argument to be extremely sophomoric and incomplete.
I wonder how many people consider the possibility that
"our" response to art isn't homogeneous at all, that different people have radically different reactions and preferences to an enormous array of ever-changing aesthetic objects, and not simply because they are raised in different cultures.
The foundational premise of any evopsych investigation into "our" artistic experience is that just such an "our" experience exists. That anyone would start from a premise that is patently false is baffling.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Jan 11, 2009 7:49:51 PM
MS
I'm told by onlookers that her sober response was: "I'm speechless"
Best!
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca | Jan 11, 2009 7:59:13 PM
MS
I'm told by onlookers that her sober response was: "I'm speechless"
Best!
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca | Jan 11, 2009 7:59:56 PM
Nick, it's nice to see you. I agree things can get too simplified, and there is nothing simple about aesthetics or evopsych -- yet.
Retinally, if not culturally or individually, however, "we" may be enough alike to warrant a reference to "our" artistic experience. Retinally speaking, the eye is constantly seeking repose through harmony, though the mind may seek stimulation of many kinds in what it proposes to look at. Paintings incorporating nature views, for instance, might not be your cup of fur, but your eye would find them restful because of the opportunity to travel in and out through the illusion of distance afforded -- an action experienced as deeply refreshing, optically, and one that we seek for that reason, even if we'd rather look at Kandinsky or Sol Lewitt. This is not woo, but a characteristic of "our" vision and its effect on our experience of ourselves. Is it wrong for philosophers to grapple with such as this?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 11, 2009 8:23:43 PM
It may be cultural (look at the flat and mundane art of the Religious Dark Ages of Europe), but humans have been making some symbolic art for quite a while. The cave art of Lascaux France, and other Cro-magnon Art is stunning at 20,000 to 30,000 old, and comparable to any images created anywhere, in my humble opinion.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Jan 11, 2009 8:43:54 PM
Hi Elatia,
I'm not sure. It is clear that we can make tentative inferences about the (say) visual experiences of others, and that there are certain behavioural clues from which we might make such inferences. However, attempts to discover what property unifies all objects that produce aesthetic experiences have failed, and this is almost certainly because the human mind can adapt (during a lifetime, not over millenia) towards an enormous array of different responses and experiences.
(note that a study which shows that, in general the average person in various cultures prefers a certain category of landscape painting is light-years away from demonstrating the far more difficult conclusion that human beings as such have an innate set of aesthetic preferences. Yet it is precisely this conclusion that any evopsychic analysis must rely on.)
So while I can believe that you and I have, say, roughly the same visual experience, I cannot infer that your (or any other person) will experience the vision as aesthetic. The "aesthetic" seems to be an ever-changing and essentially open category.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Jan 11, 2009 8:49:52 PM
From the review:
“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.”
If the article correctly represents Dutton’s argument, then he has made, in my view, a gross error. If all art is the result of evolved aesthetic preferences, how can any art be in any way worthy of censure? According to Dutton, people have evolved to appreciate art objects like landscape paintings because they confer information useful to hunting, husbandry, or farming (let us let this eminently debatable point stand for the moment). But this theory does not explain the appreciation of abstract or radical art, which nevertheless exists, whether or not people like Dutton care for such art. So in preferring Duchamp to Ansel Adams, have I somehow escaped the influence of my genes? And if this is possible, doesn’t this very fact invalidate the claim that art appreciation is necessarily evolved?
Dutton, like Pinker before him, seems to derive normative principles from his theory of evolved aesthetics. Some art seems to correspond to evolutionary principles. Therefore, this art somehow more correct, proper, or seemly than the radical art that apparently scandalizes evolved sensibilities. If the totalizing theory of evolutionary psychology is correct, it must account for all human activity, not just the middle-brow culture that seems most “natural.” It must even explain the value of “post-modern” ideology and the hated “blank-slate view of culture,” which, given the facticity of their presence, must themselves have evolved in service of reproduction and survival.
Posted by: Ross K. | Jan 11, 2009 9:18:17 PM
---which promise to rescue aesthetics from the fog of post-modernist theory. Who needs Jacques Derrida when there's evolutionary psychology?
Derrida represents Relativism, and it's bland pseudo-intellectual pabulum of non critical sameness, and lack of critical investigation.
I think that all cultures (I'm speaking of Homo Sapiens, not our earlier ancestors) have developed symbolic thought, and the art form that this evolutionary strategy has brought.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Jan 11, 2009 10:16:10 PM
Dave Rannig: It may be cultural (look at the flat and mundane art of the Religious Dark Ages of Europe), but humans have been making some symbolic art for quite a while. The cave art of Lascaux France, and other Cro-magnon Art is stunning at 20,000 to 30,000 old, and comparable to any images created anywhere, in my humble opinion.
There may be some truth to what Dave is saying if you want to believe neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego. He declares that while 90% of art is culture driven (put that in the category of "art history /appreciation), 10% is universal human reaction rooted in the brain. Ramachandran discussed the biological rationale of art on BBC's Reith Lectures series on The Emerging Mind. See his views of The Artful Brain. An excerpt.
Ramachandran seems to suggest that the "universal" appeal of art lies in presenting a slightly distorted but plausible version of the real thing. *Symbolic art* in other words, is more universally appealing.
Posted by: Ruchira | Jan 11, 2009 10:59:13 PM
Reminds me of Komar and Melamids Most Wanted/Least Wanted Paintings
http://www.diacenter.org/km/painting.html
I guess I'm more interested in the 90% endless variation than 10% sameness.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Jan 12, 2009 12:18:20 AM
A particularly gratifying experience of art consists in coming to admire and understand what, at first, repelled you or just left you uninterested. But that's a very different feeling from being swept off your feet because a work of art has sounded the tonic chord and you'll never be the same again. That's not a value judgment -- a la Komar and Melamid's Most Wanted/Least Wanted project -- except to point out that the very same work of art can fall into either of those categories depending on who's doing the looking.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 12, 2009 12:31:11 AM
Ross: an excellent analysis. The bizarre shift into the normative is not something I initially noticed but if, as you say, Dutton actually makes that shift, well... I find it hard to believe that such ideas actually find publishers.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Jan 12, 2009 3:58:47 PM
Nick, I haven’t read either Dutton’s book or Pinker’s Blank Slate, so I can’t claim expertise. (I have considered picking up The Blank Slate, but as the kind of humanities academic that Pinker hates, I’m afraid it would be an exercise in self-indulgent infuriation, like an atheist browsing through the latest by Rick Warren). But from the reviews I have read, Pinker and Dutton both seem to have reformist projects in mind when it comes to intellectual and artistic culture. This is from Louis Menand’s (mostly critical) review of The Blank Slate:
“Deviations make him suspicious, and modern art, in his book, is the prime suspect. Pinker believes not only that evolutionary psychology can explain why human beings create and consume art (it's mostly for reasons having to do with the drive for prestige). He believes that evolutionary psychology can explain what is wrong with art today—the decline of the high-art traditions, the loss of the critic's social status, and the "pretentious and unintelligible scholarship" of contemporary humanities departments. "I will seek," he says, "a diagnosis for these three ailing endeavors."”
So Pinker apparently believes that evolutionary psychology can be both descriptive and normative: it can explain why we have art and the kind of art we should have. But again, this seems to undo the entire evolutionary psychological project. If all behaviors are selected in order to further reproduction and survival, how can one claim that some cultural practices are preferable to others? How can some endeavors be “ailing,” when all cultural undertakings are the result of genetic imperatives which evolved during the Pleistocene period? If there is the kind of decline in arts and academics that Pinker laments (a pretty tired conservative refrain), it would seem to be unambiguous evidence for the influence of culture.
Incidentally, Denis Dutton is also the man behind Arts and Letters Daily, a sort of center-right 3 Quarks Daily.
Posted by: Ross K. | Jan 12, 2009 6:57:05 PM
Jonah Lehrer says that Denis Dutton “reserves his harshest criticisms for the modernists, whom he holds responsible for things like ‘pure abstraction in painting . . . random word-order poetry . . . and [Duchamp’s] readymades’”—all implicitly considered “art” by both writers.
For now, let me make just a few comments on Lehrer’s concluding remarks. (I plan to read, and comment on, Dutton’s book at a later date.) According to Lehrer, “we call [something] art” because “we can’t explain” it. In truth, everything that exists (including art) has an identity independent of our explanations or opinions. We call something “furniture,” for example, because it possesses the defining attributes that characterize all furniture (chairs, beds, desks, etc.) and that distinguish furniture from everything else that exists.
So, too, we call something “art” because it possesses the defining attributes that characterize all art (“fine art,” that is). As Michelle Kamhi and I argue in ‘What Art Is’ (Open Court, 2000), if something does not possess these attributes, it is not art, even if the entire artworld insists that it is.
Posted by: Louis Torres | Jan 14, 2009 4:19:37 PM
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