The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [0]
THE ART
INSTINCT
Beauty, Pleasure,
&Human Evolution
DENIS DUTTON
Copyright © 2009 by Denis Dutton
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dutton, Denis.
The art instinct : beauty, plea sure, and human evolution / Denis Dutton.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-1-60819-193-2
Aesthetics. 2. Art—Philosophy. 3. Evolution (Biology) 4. Instinct. I. Title.
BH39. D84 2009
701'.17—dc22
2008028304
First U.S. Edition 2009
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Designed by Rachel Reiss
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
For Margit, Sonia, and Ben
Contents
Introduction
1. Landscape and Longing
2. Art and Human Nature
3. What Is Art?
4. “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art”
5. Art and Natural Selection
6. The Uses of Fiction
7. Art and Human Self-Domestication
8. Intention, Forgery, Dada: Three Aesthetic Problems
9. The Contingency of Aesthetic Values
10. Greatness in the Arts
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
These pages offer a way of looking at the arts that flies in the face writing and criticism today—a way that I believe has more validity, more power, and more possibilities than the hermetic discourse that deadens so much of the humanities. It is time to look at the arts in the of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—to talk about instinct art.
What can Darwin possibly tell us about artistic creation? To be sure, Darwinian evolution may explain our physical features—the function the pancreas or the origin of our opposable thumb—but our Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Bach’s Chaconne, or Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950? The idea that humans have a mating instinct— perhaps. A maternal instinct, maybe. But an art instinct? The very seems oxymoronic.
Instincts, we tend to think, are automatic, unconscious patterns behavior. The spider’s web that glistens in the morning dew was dictated a gene tic code in the spider’s tiny brain. The web may be a lovely sight our eyes, but its beauty is a mere by-product of a spider’s way of enjoying breakfast. From the standpoint of either the spider or the human observer, such pretty accidents of nature are a long way from how normally regard works of art.
Art works are the most complex and diverse of human achievements, creations of free human will and conscious execution. Art-making rational choice, intuitive talent, and the highest levels of learned, innate, skills. Every member of a web-spinning spider species essentially the same web from the same code as every other member. Art works, on the other hand, tend toward a personal expression for perperformances of the same tragedy or intermezzo. The arts are about parpaticularity. They bring together traditions, genres, an artist’s private experience, fantasy, and emotion, fused and transformed in aesthetic imagination.
On top of this, artistic works and perperformances are often among the most gaudy and flamboyant of human creations—seemingly the opposite of pragmatic behavior—while at the rarefied level of the most profound and enduring masterpieces, they can reveal an elevated spirituality unparalleled in human experience. Any way you look at it, the arts have nothing to do with the mundane facts of body and brain that Darwinian evolution typically explains.
Everything I’ve just said about the arts is accurate—except the last sentence. In this book I intend to show why thinking that the arts beyond