The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [112]
Intellectual history has played itself out in this way in part because the blank-slate view of culture and meaning meshes perfectly with important aspects of modernist ideology. From the start of the last century, modernist painters, writers, composers, and art theorists consoled themselves that audience re sis tance was a mark of worthwhile creative endeavor. Modernists looked back at the nineteenth century and saw that bourgeois listeners had found Beethoven ugly and dissonant, Manet and Baudelaire obscene, Wagner nonsensical, and Flaubert offensive but had come in time to appreciate their genius. In fact, all great art of the avant-garde is rejected until a larger public comes to understand it. The story of the premiere of the Rite of Spring is therefore modernism’s most enduring morality tale: what once was so outrageous, so unintelligible, that it could cause a riot, came eventually, through knowledge and familiarity, to be accepted as a masterpiece. Modernism thus extrapolated from such incidents a general rule: our ability to adapt to new kinds music or art has no limit whatsoever.
Allied with blank-slate psychology, promoters of modernism cited Dadaist experiments to insist that beauty could reside in any perceptual object, that people could be “taught” to take aesthetic plea sure in any whatsoever. Once this fact was understood, so modernist hopes went, we would all become free to enjoy pure abstraction in painting, atonality in music, random word-order poetry, Finnegans Wake, and readymades, just as much as we enjoy Ingres, Mozart, or Jane Austen. Difficult” modernist art, literature, and music could become popular— culturally dominant, in fact—given enough time and familiarity. Anton Webern longingly imagined, the postman on his rounds might someday be overheard whistling an atonal tune.
The Darwinian claim, on the other hand, is that at the heart of such arguments lies a fatal non sequitur: while it is true that culture sanctions and habituates a wide variety of aesthetic tastes, it whistling one of Schoenberg’s tone rows, the reason must be that the postman’s culture deprived him of the chance to appreciate the beauties atonality. Human nature, so evolutionary aesthetics insists, sets limits what culture and the arts can accomplish with the human personality and its tastes. Contingent facts about human nature ensure not only some things in the arts will be difficult to appreciate but that appreciation of them may be impossible.
Any sophisticated and worldly observer in the eighteenth century could already see the ways aesthetic taste was informed or determined historic conditions. But an enlarged or broadened way of thinking about arts is extended by Darwinian evolution from the realm of culture the domain of human nature itself: the vast realm of cultural is created by a mind whose underlying interests, preferences, capacities are products of human prehistory. Art may seem largely cultural, but the art instinct that conditions it is not.
II
We are all happy to acknowledge the haphazard contingency of cultural values. Think how different our lives or our cultures might been if, to cite a few random examples, the Greeks had lost Marathon, the Library of Alexandria had not burned, German installed as the official language of the American colonies (it was), Shakespeare had died as a child, Schubert had lived to seventy, or Hitler had invaded Britain instead of the Soviet Union. Human history and culture are subject to countless accidents or decisions, known and unknown. It follows there is very little inevitability in man history.
If there is anything fated in human history, it is owed to the per influence of a genetically determined, unchanging human nature. If that had been different, for