The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [120]
Because (1) so many activities require skills that, if they have any or expressive potential at all (cake decorating, lawn care), can marginally turned into arts in some of the ways defined in chapter 3, because (2) even the canonical arts overlap and interpenetrate with large, non-artistic domains of human enjoyment, there is plenty of potential conflate artistic with other pleasures. Another factor also seeds the desire of artists, writers, musicians, ordinary audiences, and academics to endorse or to validate the arts by associating them with their favorite enthusiasms—typically political or religious causes—or alternatively to dignify their non-artistic interests by reckoning them to be artistic too.
The disputes generated by this miasma of confusion—along with a century of tedious arguments about whether this or that tribal sculpture modernist experiment is “art”—have for generations distracted attention from the fact this book is meant to explain: the universal appeal arts—from soap operas to symphonies—across cultures and through history. The principal way to make sense of the universality of art have argued throughout, to understand the arts naturalistically, terms of the evolved adaptations that both underlie the arts and constitute them. In this last chapter, however, I want to shift attention from the arts as general phenomena of wide appeal to the more rarefied pinnacles of artistic achievement: I want to examine the bearing evolutionary theory has on understanding the qualities of the greatest artistic masterpieces.
II
Clive Bell’s classic essay “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” the first chapter 1914 book Art, defends his modernist formalism in what has always for me one of the most evocative passages in the history of aesthetics. In explaining how most viewers miss the aesthetic point painting, as he understands it, by concentrating their attention on the represented content of pictures, he describes his own limited, not to say dunderheaded, musical perceptions. Bell admits that he is not musical: the subtleties of harmony and rhythm escape him, he declares, and he little sense of musical form. Once in a while, however, when he feeling “clear and bright and intent,” perhaps at the beginning of a concert, he can for a while appreciate music “as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no relation what ever to the significance and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state mind to which pure visual form transports me.” His normal state of mind at a concert, as he explained, was quite inferior:
Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that cannot grasp, the ideas of life. Incapable of feeling the austere feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation—the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, cries of children, or the laughing of demons—to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should pleased; they would afford new points of departure for trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought.
Such trains of agreeable thought, Bell explains, are a way of using art “as a means to the emotions of life.” He then concludes with a haunting passage:
I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life reading into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with razor. I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a jolly country. No one need be ashamed