The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [105]
The sport and athletic analogy is, however, of limited use in its application to art forgery. Many of the physical achievements of sport stars one-dimensional, judged according to a single criterion. No one much cares if a sprinter or weight lifter wins an Olympic gold medal gracefully or awkwardly, just as soccer fans want to see their team win World Cup, what ever it takes: an ugly win is normally preferred to loss, no matter how brave or elegant.
Indisputably, works of art are pretty things suited to disinterested contemplation. It is naive, however, to treat them exclusively in this because works of art are also windows into the mind of another human being. We are likely to find a Mathew Brady photograph of Lincoln touching because it lets us see directly into the sad, knowing eyes great and doomed man. But Rembrandt’s portraits of his son Titus mother reading the Bible provide a completely different experience. We do not look through them to see the little boy or the old woman. Rather, these paintings take us into Rembrandt’s mind. They express, therefore reveal, his love—as father, as son—for his subjects. The history of painting is not a history of what the Europe an Alps once looked like, or how people dressed in the fifteenth century, or how summer sun can dry out a hayfield in Languedoc. It is a history of innumerable human visions of the world. Creative arts inexhaustibly give ways of looking into human souls and thus expand our own outlook palpably absurd as a claim to technical skill (for the record, it absurd), our interest in Vermeer lies in wanting to know how that par Dutch genius saw his seventeenth-century world, including human beings that peopled it. Eric Hebborn might well have done plausible job of a Rembrandt Titus, but it could never be Rembrandt’s loving vision of his son: it would be just be one clever criminal’s attempt convince us that this is how Rembrandt saw his little boy.
Since forgery episodes so often involve the foolishness of curators and critics as well as the financial misfortunes of the rich, it is easy dismiss them as amusing sideshows in art history. Tracing our objections forgery down to their Darwinian roots, however, puts the subject different light. Authenticity, which in the arts means at the most level communion with another human soul, is something we destined by evolution to want from literature, music, painting, and other arts. This sense of communion exhilarates and elevates the spirit. How odd that this ancient ideal should should be explained by a theory pioneered not by some great historian of the arts, but by a nineteenth-century naturalist, an expert on pigeon-breeding, barnacles, and finches of the Galápagos Islands. It is evolution that tells us about some of the deepest longings and needs that works of art touch.
VIII
In the run-up to the 2004 Turner Prize, the most prestigious contemporary art prize awarded in Britain, the sponsor of the award, Gordon’s polled five hundred of the most powerful people in the art world. Leading dealers, critics, artists, and curators were asked what in their opinion was the most influential work of art of the twentieth century, taken from a list of twenty nominations. When the votes were tabulated, back in second place was Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ahead Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, Picasso’s Guernica, and Matisse’s Red Studio in fifth place, with works by Joseph Beuys, Constantin Brancusi, Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, and Henry Moore bringing rear. The winner by far, with 64 percent of the vote for number long ago: Fountain, the men’s urinal put forward for exhibition