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If personal distinction is a basic desideratum in social life, it is much more important in the life of art. The appetite for seeing a strong artistic personality stamp a distinctive individuality on an artistic per for mance creation seems to be universal. The fascination, sometimes near obsession, with individual expression is evidence for its being an extension arts of an evolved adaptation relevant to interpersonal recognition and evaluation—something that has come about, no doubt, through ropean culture—that art was less individualistic before the rise of capitalism, or that in tribal societies the fact that it is often unsigned shows that individuality of expression is not universally important. The evidence is heavily against this hypothesis. Just because there was no call artisans who built and decorated the medieval cathedrals to sign their contributions to those great communal efforts does not entail that work of especially skilled individuals was not admired in its day. My own research in remote New Guinea villages clearly shows that the work individual dancers, poets, and carvers is a focus of fascinated attention. The course, carvings were not signed until very recently—why should they signed in a small society where everyone knows everyone else, knows who made what, and there is in any event no writing?

From New Guinea to New York, different cultures have varied ways dealing with artistic individuality: in India, the classical tradition treats most famous singers, dancers, and instrumentalists much as in Europe, while in China, artistic individuality has in different periods been relatively played down by a rhetoric of modesty and self-effacement. But there is no living artistic tradition where it can be said that art is produced with no regard for the individuals who do it. The whole Western perperformance tradition is one of powerful personalities producing per for mances that are uniquely their own. We call these people stars.

But the same goes for canonical creative arts, where desire to experience an individual’s distinct and developed emotional tone, the manifestation of a personality, draws audiences to art. The artists whose work survived and achieved wide cross-cultural appeal are people whose output is marked by a persis tent, distinct emotional tone, within individual works and also across a whole output: Leonardo, Wagner, Jane Austen, Hokusai, Schiller, Cervantes, Sesshu Toyo, Cézanne, Homer, Brahms, Murasaki, Shakespeare, Basho, Monet, Dostoyevsky.

Here, it seems to me, we confront an innate, evolved potential parpaticularly important to the arts. It is no more learned than other basic, evolved potential for deriving gratification from food, problem-solving. Like other evolved potentials for pleasure, heritable—that is, individual sensitivity to it varies in the population. With people for whom the arts are a source of continual enjoyment, what we get in the atmosphere of the Odyssey, from looking straight through Monet’s rough painted surface and into the waters of a pond, from the wit and sense of life in Jane Austen’s account of the Ben-net family gossiping, or from the yearning voice of Yeats’s poetry.

The importance of the individuality of emotional saturation in be demonstrated with a philosopher’s thought experiment. Consider a work with a strong and distinct sense of emotional expression, say, Brahms Symphony no. 4 in E minor. That work is drenched with a certain melancholy, a feeling, or so it seems, that no other piece of music quite has, a feeling that is embedded in the notes and construction particular piece of music. Now suppose that in a hundred years’ time, developments of the pharmacological manipulation of moods and emotions have become so sophisticated that you can buy a pill that will give the specific emotional fix of the E-minor symphony: swallow it and you’ll experience the exact same emotional feeling that you get from to the Brahms. Can you imagine taking the pill in order to save expense of concert tickets, or even the cost of