The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [2]
Whether a cross-cultural definition of art is even possible is disputed some anthropologists and art theorists, so the next chapter examines academic seminar-room objection, “But they don’t have our concept art.” The whole idea of asking whether a culture has a “different concept” of art from ours raises a curious challenge: you cannot even call different concept of art unless it shares something in common with our concept. Otherwise, why did you use the word “art” in the first place? Chapter 4 explores this paradox, arguing that cross-cultural transformations have been wildly exaggerated and misunderstood by anthropologists and others intent on exoticizing foreign cultures and denying the universality of art.
What does it mean to call the arts evolutionary adaptations? How pleasures of playing video games or listening to fugues derive from instinctive processes that were in place tens of thousands of years ago? the plea sure-seeking at the heart of artistic experience a by-product ancient instincts that evolved for other purposes, or is it a discrete oversized human brain—phenomena about which evolutionary science can have nothing to say. This false picture ignores the fact that the arts, like language, emerge spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value in prehistory. The obvious surface differences between art forms cross-culturally no more argues against their instinctual origins than the differences between Portuguese and Swahili show that language does not rely on a universal ensemble of instinctive capacities.
Creative storytelling—perhaps the oldest of arts—is found throughout history and, like language itself, is spontaneously devised and understood by human beings everywhere. Chapter 6 examines human plea sure in imaginative fictions, from tales told in preliterate tribes through Greek theater, bulky nineteenth-century novels, and film and televised entertainments today. Far from being derived from sets of cultural conventions, the enjoyment of fiction shows clear evidence of Darwinian adaptation, for instance, in how even very young children can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories, distinguishing story-worlds from each other and from reality with a high degree of sophistication. Not only does the artistic structure of stories speak Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity.
The survival value provided by imaginative and linguistic capacities only part of evolution, however. Darwin himself knew that many of the most visibly striking features of animals are products not of natural for survival against the rigors of nature, but of sexual selection. this separate evolutionary process, what counts is an animal’s capacity generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce. While natural selection can give a bird species brownish feathers that camouflage on its nest, sexual selection produces the brilliantly colored plumage that birds may use to impress mates. As chapter 7 shows, with human beings, sexual selection explains some of the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality, including the most gaudy, profligate, and “show-off