The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [129]
1. Complexity. Aristotle analogized works of art to animals in sense that both have parts that are organically related to one another perceiver’s experience. By saying that both could be beautiful, he marking an important fact about all adequate works of art: their are meaningfully interrelated within a whole work. That is say of a Shakespeare sonnet or Schubert song that you “could change” a single word or note without detracting from the aesthetic of the whole. If we turn to the greatest art with this in mind, it incites plea sure by presenting audiences with the highest degree meaning-complexity the mind can grasp. Of course, minds differ in their capacities to grasp meaning of high complexity: it will depend on maturity, memory abilities, familiarity with cultural referents, and general intelligence and reasoning ability. It also depends on the individual’s Kant’s unresponsiveness to color in painting).
Complexity does not mean sheer complicatedness but rather the densely significant interrelations of, say, poetry, plotting, and dramatic rhythm in a play like Shakespeare’s King Lear. And if understanding intricacies of a work of art can be demanding for audiences, it superhuman capacities from artists. The psychologist and historian of scientific and artistic genius Dean Simonton argues that most brilliant creators in the history of the arts were without apparent exception highly intelligent individuals, as they would have to be. chess masters work out possibilities of thirty-two pieces on sixty-squares, an opera composer has to be seen as playing an analogous five-or six-dimensional chess, making story, characters, poetry, action, plot, above all music cohere into a unified whole—one where every move counts. Artistic masterpieces fuse myriad disparate elements, layer upon layer of meaning, into a single, unified, self-enhancing whole.
In this respect alone, works such as Der Rosenkavalier or War and Peace not just achievements: they seem more like miracles. Above even highest levels of chess, mathematics, or science itself, the greatest works art unite every aspect of human experience: intellect and the will, emotions and human values of every kind (including ugliness evil). Psychologically, some of the most staggering moments in aesthetic experience, the ones we may remember all our lives, are those instants where the events that make up the whole of a vast novel, an opera, poem, sonata, or painting fall meaningfully into place. The finest works draw us into them in order to yield up the deep, intricate imaginative experiences. They are marked by the utmost lucidity and coherence.
2. Serious content. The themes of great works are love, death, and fate. The salvation of the soul and a happy ending in eternity loom central to art in some religious traditions, but we also find even in most religiously influenced texts, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to present, tragic suggestions that salvation may not be the lot of man. Artistic masterpieces need not be solemn and can end joyfully (Jane Austen’s are among the most delightful), but even when they do, they merely jolly and amusing, and offer an implicit nod, if not to a darker side of human existence, then at least to what might be termed a realistic many listeners as astounding. Among other uncanny attributes,