The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [130]
That the arts do not attain greatness through prettiness or attractiveness can be illustrated by considering the ambiguous place of sexual acts art. Although love is the most pervasive theme for representative arts everywhere, explicit eroticism does not tend to figure importantly in greatest masterpieces. It is far too easy, in my view, to attribute this merely to social repression: even in artistic genres that allow a flourishing erotic subculture, such as Japanese woodblock printing, openly erotic works do not rate among the highest achievements. Nor, I think, is this attributable to the innate, universal aversion to engaging in sexual intercourse in public. This issue deserves comment from an evolutionary standpoint.
The evolutionary psychology of art has to begin somewhere, some of the earliest speculations in the field going back for a de cade more have involved straightforward observations such as the analysis female desirability in terms of waist-to-hip ratios. But as obviously applicable as it is to representations of the female body through this centerfold theory of beauty tells us very little about the place love, with its intrinsic tensions and endless complexities, as a theme the arts. Sex itself is just too simple. In fact, eroticism is treated most art and literature as either a subject for comic interludes or offstage plot element for tragedy. Pure eroticism by itself is no more likely as a theme for great art than purely green and pleasant Pleistocene calendar landscapes are a likely theme for the greatest paintings. enduring masterpiece that presented a perfect, pretty landscape would more probably use it as, say, a background for the Expulsion from Eden than as a central subject in its own right. A portrait of work of art than an Alberto Vargas pinup, attractive waist-to-ratios notwithstanding. The evolutionary implications of waist-to-ratios for art history are not unlike the evolutionary implications presence of sweetness in food. That sugars are in all cuisines sweetness makes some foods more attractive for evolutionary does not mean that a bowl of corn syrup and a plate of sugar be dinner.
3. Purpose. As high complexity of structure and seriousness of themes expression mark great works of art, so does authenticity of artistic purpose—a sense that the artist means it. In his remarkable study of highest excellence in the arts and sciences, Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray puts forward the idea that the greatest art tends to created against a cultural backdrop of what he calls “transcendental goods”—a belief that real beauty exists, there is objective truth, and good is a genuine value in dependent of human cultures and choices. Taken together, Murray writes, these three kinds of good enable the moral vision” that is characteristic of the most enduring art: “Extract moral vision, and Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 becomes a violent cartoon. Extract its moral vision, and Huckleberry Finn becomes Tom Sawyer.” Murray connects with this idea the claim that “great accomplishment in the arts depends upon a culture’s enjoying a well-articulated, widely held conception of the good” and that “art created absence of a well-articulated conception of the good is likely to and ephemeral.”
This falls in line with Tolstoy’s view that artistic value is achieved only when an art work expresses the authentic values of its maker, especially when those values are shared by the artist’s culture or community. Tolstoy damned modern art as amusing but spiritually empty while lavishing praise on naive folk art, especially the Christian art of