<div>Making similar or overlapping points to Dutton's are "Human Universals" by Donald Brown, which is a comprehensive survey of the anthropological study of human universals, human nature, culture vs. biology, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller where the subtitle says it all.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Regards,</div>
<div>Mike LaTorra<br><br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:03 PM, PJ Manney <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pjmanney@gmail.com">pjmanney@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">>From what I can see, the core of what he says is not exactly heresy --<br>in fact, it should seem pretty obvious -- but academic approaches to<br>
art suffer from extreme cultural correctness, cults of personality or<br>doctrine and over-intellectualization and therefore, inaccuracy (or<br>just plain ridiculousness), and he's swimming against this school of<br>self-satisfied fish. Bless his little cotton socks for doing so.<br>
<br>Once again, it comes back to generating empathy for biological<br>fitness. Funny, that.<br><br>PJ<br><br><a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/217078/january-28-2009/denis-dutton" target="_blank">http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/217078/january-28-2009/denis-dutton</a><br>
<br><a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-denis-dutton8-2009feb08,0,4082973.story" target="_blank">http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-denis-dutton8-2009feb08,0,4082973.story</a><br><br>>From the Los Angeles Times<br>
BOOK REVIEW<br>'The Art Instinct' by Denis Dutton<br>Where do humanity's expressions of art come from? The author contends<br>that they are biological--not only cultural.<br>By Michael S. Roth<br><br>February 8, 2009<br>
<br>The Art Instinct<br><br>Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution<br><br>Denis Dutton<br><br>Bloomsbury Press: 280 pp., $25<br><br>Denis Dutton seems to have great ambitions in "The Art Instinct" as<br>well as a willingness to court controversy. He wants to explain how<br>
art arises out of biological impulses that are universal. He also<br>wants to develop a theory of art that shows that our practice of and<br>judgments about the arts ought to be informed by an understanding of<br>their innate, instinctual base.<br>
<br>This seems so ambitious because many of us tend to think of art as a<br>matter of personal or cultural preference. To discover the universal<br>human biological underpinnings for this preference appears to be a<br>staggering task. Dutton, a philosopher who curates the popular, useful<br>
website Arts & Letters Daily, tackles his assignment with wit, clarity<br>and a basic reasonableness. He winds up overstating his case, but in<br>doing so he raises important issues concerning biology and culture.<br>
<br>Dutton describes how efforts to ensure that we are not imposing our<br>own aesthetic categories on non-Western peoples have resulted in<br>blindness to human commonality. There is an enormous intellectual and<br>economic investment in the differences of art practices. In academic<br>
discussions of art, scholars have often been so enamored of difference<br>that they have missed anything that might be shared or universal.<br><br>What does Dutton mean by saying that art is grounded in universal<br>biological impulses? It turns out that he's not saying anything very<br>
controversial because, viewed from a great distance, all human<br>practices are ultimately grounded in biology. (Where else would they<br>be grounded?) You like Britney Spears, and Dutton loves Beethoven. It<br>turns out that both musical choices stem from the preferences that<br>
evolved in the Pleistocene environment. Dutton would say the same<br>thing if you preferred Lil Wayne, Wagner, Javanese gamelan or Scottish<br>bagpipe music. Biology really makes no difference to our judgments<br>about music, except in the sense that we can always appeal to it as<br>
the ultimate ground of our pleasures and dislikes.<br><br>Dutton knows this, of course, and he admits that cheesecake and Wagner<br>speak to the same innate pleasures. So what's the point of appealing<br>to the innate? The point is to underscore that art is universal and<br>
that all cultures have developed artistic practices. This is a<br>controversial point, and Dutton argues for it convincingly. He shows<br>that the aesthetic, like the erotic, arises spontaneously across the<br>globe. It is not simply a biological adaptation but has developed<br>
because of the capacities that have played an adaptive function for<br>our species.<br><br>Biological adaptation is only half of the Darwinian toolbox from which<br>Dutton draws. The other half is the concept of "sexual selection,"<br>
which, he says, gives hope for a "complete theory of the origin of the<br>arts." Darwin developed the idea of sexual selection to explain the<br>apparently gratuitous or nonfunctional design of some animals. The<br>
classic example is the peacock's tail, which Darwin understood to be a<br>sign of fitness that would attract mates. Dutton takes this idea and<br>runs with it, and so he categorizes every display of skill -- from<br>ornate language to technical drawing ability -- as a display of<br>
fitness. Anything that this philosopher thinks is important in the<br>arts -- from readymades to storytelling -- he weaves into a story of<br>fitness and sexual selection. Anything he doesn't think important<br>(atonal music, for instance, or a desire to shock) is excluded from<br>
his narrative of attraction. Once Dutton asserts that "fitness<br>displays" are no longer about sex but about human achievement, he<br>feels free to ground his own preferences in a just-so story with<br>biological metaphors. Claiming natural underpinnings for one's own<br>
tastes is an old-fashioned move to display the "fitness" of one's<br>preferences, but calling this story Darwinian doesn't make it less<br>circular.<br><br>Despite these shortcomings, "The Art Instinct" is an important book<br>
that raises questions often avoided in contemporary aesthetics and art<br>criticism. Dutton's familiarity with art practices and objects from<br>New Guinea complement his enthusiastic embrace of a variety of<br>canonical European art forms and artists. His arguments against major<br>
figures in the philosophy and anthropology of the arts are often<br>devastating -- and amusing. Although I don't think he has quite made<br>the case for the important biological grounds of our attraction to<br>authenticity, he has woven a powerful plea for the notion that art<br>
expresses a longing to see through the performance or object to<br>another human personality.<br><br>Dutton thinks much recent art has "gone down the wrong track," and he<br>has turned to biology to tell us why. Although he admits that innate<br>
preferences "need not control our tastes in landscape painting or even<br>our choice of a calendar," he hopes that "Darwinian aesthetics can set<br>us straight." This is called having your cake and eating it too -- no<br>
doubt a human desire that was formed in the Pleistocene period.<br><br>Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of several<br>books, including "The Ironist's Cage."<br>_______________________________________________<br>
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