The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [26]
What philosophy of art needs is an approach that begins by treating gives more curious cases what ever interest they have. I regard this approach as “naturalistic,” not in the sense that it is biologically driven though biology is relevant to it), but because it depends on per sis tent cross-culturally identified patterns of behavior and discourse: the making, experiencing, and assessing of works of art. Many of the ways art is discussed and experienced can easily move across culture boundaries, and manage a global acceptance without help from academics or theorists. From Lascaux to Bollywood, artists, writers, and musicians often have little trouble in achieving cross-cultural aesthetic understanding. The natural center on which such understanding exists is where theory must begin.
II
Characteristic features found cross-culturally in the arts can be reduced list of core items, twelve in the version given below, which define art terms of a set of cluster criteria. Some of the items single out features works of art; others, qualities of the experience of art. The items on the are not chosen to suit a preconceived theoretical purpose; to the contrary, these criteria purport to offer a neutral basis for theoretical speculation. The list could be described as inclusive in its manner of referring arts across cultures and historical epochs, but it is not for that reason compromise among competing, mutually exclusive positions. It reflects vast realm of human experience that people have little trouble identifying artistic. The philosopher David Novitz has remarked that “precise formulations and rigorous definitions” are of little help in capturing the meaning of art cross-culturally. But even if, as Novitz says, there is “ one way” to be a work of art, it does not follow that the converse “many ways” are so hopelessly numerous as to be unspecifiable, even if the domain they refer to is as ragged and multilayered as that of art. In fact, that they are specifiable, however open to dispute, is required by the very existence of a literature on cross-cultural aesthetics.
A reminder: granting the existence of myriad marginal cases, by “ “arts” I mean artifacts (sculptures, paintings, and decorated objects, such as tools or the human body, and scores and texts considered as sometimes on the objects created; other times we refer more to the experience of these objects. Working out these distinctions is a separate task. The list is therefore the signal characteristics of art considered as a universal, cross-cultural category. This is not to claim that anything on my list unique to art or its experience. Many of these aspects of art are continuous with non-art experiences and capacities, and reminders of these are in parentheses at the conclusion of each entry.
1. Direct plea sure. The art object—narrative story, crafted artifact, or visual and aural perperformance—is valued as a source of immediate experiential pleasure in itself, and not essentially for its utility in producing something else that is either useful or pleasur able. This quality of sure of beauty, or “aesthetic plea sure,” as it is so often called, derives analysis from rather different sources. A pure, deeply saturated color be pleasur able to see; grasping the detailed coherence of a tightly plotted story can give plea sure (similar to the pleasure of solving a clever crossword puzzle