The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [3]
Chapter 8 turns to three classic disputes in art and aesthetic theory in order to see how they look in light of evolution: (1) whether artists’ intentions should be decisive in interpreting works of art (the “intentional fallacy”); (2) the aesthetic challenge of a convincing art forgery everybody loves a fake, and can’t distinguish it from an original, why complain?); (3) the artistic status of Dada and its deliberately controversial gestures, such as Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal on a plinth, Fountain. These three issues are perennial art-theory talking points because they involve conflicts between contradictory factors in our aesthetic experience: “disinterested” contemplation, for instance, butting against an instinctive concern with the character of the artist, including admiration of skill.
The conflicts described in chapter 8 show that the art instinct proper not a single genetically driven impulse similar to the liking for sweetness but a complicated ensemble of impulses—sub-instincts, we might say—that involve responses to the natural environment, to life’s likely threats and opportunities, the sheer appeal of colors or sounds, social status, intellectual puzzles, extreme technical difficulty, erotic interests, even costliness. There is no reason to hope that this haphazard concatenation of impulses, pleasures, and capacities can be made to form pristine rational system.
Moreover, as I go on to explain in chapter 9, not only cultural traditions but evolved capacities set limits on what is possible for an art form. Smell, for example, despite being of crucial survival value in prehistory being a source of intense aesthetic plea sure, did not become the basis for a fully developed art tradition. Pitched sounds, in contrast, when combined and rhythmically presented are material for one of the most important art forms of all. This despite the curious fact that a sensitivity pitched sounds had no particular survival value in our evolutionary past. Added to the paradoxes of the previous chapter, this comparison between smell and music shows the contingent character of our evolved aesthetic responses: the art instinct did not evolve in prehistory and come to flower in the myriad cultures and technologies as a complete, coherent theoretical system.
As objects of feeling, nevertheless, works of art provide some of most profound, emotionally moving experiences available to human of Hollywood, soap operas, and romance novels, I turn at the the exalted summits of aesthetic experience, what Clive Bell called cold white peaks of art”—masterpieces such as the Iliad, the cathedral Chartres, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, King Lear, Breughel’s Hunters the Snow, Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, Wordsworth’s “Tin-tern Abbey,” Schubert’s Winterreise, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Beethoven’s Sonata op. 111. Works of this caliber may not have biggest artistic audiences at any given point in history, but they possess relentless capacity to arrest attention and excite the mind, generation generation. Their nobility and grandeur also flow from their ability address deep human instincts. They will live as long as we do.
A word about animals. Some readers will notice that while animals in this book to illustrate generic evolutionary processes, they completely absent from explanations of the high-order adaptations in the human art instinct. This is a deliberate omission. Animal lover though I am, I am bound to say that it does chimpanzees no favors promote their delightful scrawls to the status of art in the distinctly human sense defined in chapter 3.
In captivity, chimpanzees enjoy brushing vivid colors onto white paper. Indeed, physically altering the sheet—expressing what the phi o pher Thierry Lenain has aptly described as the chimp’s joy in “dis-ruption”— is the very essence of the thing. Many chimpanzee “ works” exist as objects with aesthetic appeal to us only because trainers remove the paper at the right point; otherwise, the chimp will continue apply paint till there is nothing