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The answer is very likely to be no, and the reason tells us something about the nature of aesthetic expression. It is not just the emotion as feeling we want from art, it is the individual artistic expression emotion—how emotions are revealed in the art, though technique, structure, balance, and the blending of sounds. Works of music are not beautiful because they arouse emotions in us as a drug might; they beautiful because of how the emotions are created by the total structure the music itself. Someone once remarked that years after forgetting characters and plot of a novel, you may still retain a memory of emotional atmosphere of the work. This too is consistent with the idea the emotional tone of art reaches deeply into the mind, not by manipulating general moods or kinds of feeling, but by creating the highly individual work of art from which unique feelings emerge.

Yes, we want feeling from art, but not as an end for which the art means: with art, the means is the end itself. It follows that emotion will never replace art, because nothing can substitute for a sense of emotional of art is another human mind incarnate: not in flesh and blood sounds, words, or colors. If you are an artist, the most enduring way achieve a lasting artistic success is to create works of aesthetic plea that are saturated with emotion, specifically expressing distinct emotions that are perceived as yours. Cheap sentimentality in art traffics emotions that are everybody’s: that is why soap opera is a genre art; consumers of soaps have little curiosity about who writes them. The greatest works of art—grand opera, for instance—are emotionally distinct, if we love them, we can’t help wondering who people like Mozart Wagner really were.

Even for relatively minor artists, establishing an individual emotional tone is crucial. Staying with music for a moment, Sergei Rachmaninoff composing at the same time as his friend Nikolai Medtner. While Medtner’s music may deserve more exposure than it now receives, does not stand up well beside Rachmaninoff’s, despite being stylistically similar. Rachmaninoff’s music has an immediate way of establishing a strong and distinct mood in the mind of the listener, the mysterious sense of an individual musical personality. Medtner’s music, contrast, whatever its graceful finish and stylistic similarities to Rach-maninoff’s, cannot express the same distinctly brooding personal atmosphere.

Extending Darwin’s original suggestion, I believe that this intense in art as emotional expression derives from wanting to see through into another human personality: it springs from a desire for knowledge of another person. When cynics disparage art criticism as “high-class gossip,” they are on to something. Talking about art is an indirect of talking about the inner lives of other people: that is, oddly, artists. In the Pleistocene, outside painting and sculpture, almost aesthetic expression we might enjoy would have come from a living After the invention of writing and, later, visual and sound recording, it became possible to enjoy art created by long-dead men and women. art is a vestigial fitness marker for courtship, or a way of knowing mind in social interchange, it follows that the love of art made dead people is an evolutionary mistake. If so, it is a mistake that profoundly marks the plea sure we take in all of the arts today.

IV

From the very beginning of this book, my aim has been to elucidate general characteristics of the arts in terms of evolved adaptations. Although have referred repeatedly to the standard canon, I have written with every intention of including in the analysis what might be dismissed end popular art. If my analysis is correct, it should enable us to talk more intelligently about the arc of art that moves from bedtime stories Sesame Street through young people’s fictions and into television soap operas, romance novels, and formulaic Hollywood movies.

However, open-mindedness about including low-end amusements under the rubric of art ought not to distract