The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [123]
Wondrous aesthetic experiences are possible in the absence of a sense larger community: the response an individual has to a beautiful landscape, for instance, or to a private, silent reading of a novel or a poem, painting, or to a recording of the Goldberg Variations heard in solitude. the arts were intrinsically social in the way that social-cohesion theory claims, we could expect that people would not only flock to hear authors’ readings of their works (where the point is the presence of the literary artist), they would also take plea sure in attending readings novels together. They would prefer standing in a crowd to see a painting a museum, rather than standing alone, and musical friends would normally come together to hear recordings. To be sure, novel readers do form book clubs; but this is less a fact about novel reading than about propensity of enthusiasts for any pleasure—dog breeding, gardening, politics—to form clubs.
My own view is that traces of sexual selection, the evolutionary pro pits suitors against each other in a competition with real winners losers, undermines the communal spirit as having an intrinsic role in Because of sexual selection, the arts retain an incorrigible sense of made by one individual person for another. Arthur Rubinstein’s recitals were often experienced as great communal occasions of the audience paying homage to a fine pianist while both he and the audience honored composers whose music was being performed. Yet Rubinstein said what he really liked in a recital was to fix his eye on some lovely sitting stage and imagine he was playing just for her. The motives of art, even Darwin knew, are ancient and complicated—directed toward a community,
perhaps, but also created to captivate an audience of one.
2. The arts are not just crafts. I have argued that an often spine-tingling part of our ancient, evolved response to the arts is the appreciation of technical achievement. That does not mean, however, that every instance of skill or craftsmanship (for instance, in the work of a plumber or an accountant) will be in itself a candidate for art.
Most people understand craft in terms of its ordinary products: weaving, pottery, and furniture-making are regarded as crafts because they use fiber, clay, and wood to produce useful artifacts. Such craftsmanship genuine skill, in the sense of minimal competence, to yield passable results. But as usually conceived, crafts only require competence—unlike arts such as painting, musical composition, and poetry, which think of as needing special talent. The British philosopher R. G. Colling-wood accepted these commonplaces but, in the 1930s, formulated the difference between art and craft in a way that made the distinction in de dent of what an artifact was made of or whether it was useful.
Craft, Collingwood argued, is skilled work purposefully directed a final product or designed artifact; the craftsman knows in advance what the end product will look like. The craftsman’s foreknowledge required by the very idea of a craft. An experienced cook following recipe to make vanilla ice cream can be described as a craftsman not because he can anticipate every problem he will meet along the way but because he clearly (not vaguely or generally) knows in advance what vanilla cream looks and tastes like and knows exactly how to whip it up. In craft, Collingwood says, the result in this way “is preconceived,” fully understood before being arrived at. Thus a cook who tries to make cream and ends up with sweet cottage cheese may have inadvertently produced a delicious dish. But as pleased as we may be with the result,