The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [30]
10. Intellectual challenge. Works of art tend to be designed to utilize combined variety of human perceptual and intellectual capacities full extent; indeed, the best works stretch them beyond ordinary limits. The full exercise of mental capacities is in itself a source of plea sure. This includes working through a complex plot, putting evidence together to recognize a problem or solution before a character story recognizes it, balancing and combining formal and illustrative elements in a complicated painting, and following the transformations an opening melody recapitulated at the end of a piece of music. The plesure of meeting intellectual challenges is most obvious in vastly complicated art, such as in the experience of War and Peace or Wagner’s Ring. But even works that are simple on one level, such as Duchamp’s readymades, may deny easy explanation and give plea sure in tracing their complex historical or interpretive dimensions. (Games such as chess Trivial Pursuit, cooking from complicated recipes, home handyman tasks, television quiz programs, video games, or even working out tax can offer challenges of exercise and mastery that result in achieved pleasure.)
11. Art traditions and institutions. Art objects and per for mances, as much in small-scale oral cultures as in literate civilizations, are created and to a degree given significance by their place in the history and traditions of their art. As philoso pher Jerrold Levinson has argued, works gain their identity by the ways they are found in historical traditions, lines of historical prece dents. Overlapping this notion are earlier views, argued by philoso phers Arthur Danto, Terry Diffey, and George Dickie, to the effect that works of art gain meaning by being produced an art world, in what are essentially socially constructed art institutions. Institutional theorists tend to apply their minds to readymades and conceptual art because the interest of such works is close to by their importance in the historical situation of their production. Such works stand in contrast to other canonical works such Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which, although open to extensive and institutional analysis, is able to gather for itself a huge enthusiastic world audience of listeners who know little or nothing its institutional context. Even a minimal appreciation, on the other hand, of Duchamp’s Fountain requires a knowledge of art history, or least of the contemporary art context. (Virtually all organized social activities—medicine, warfare, education, politics, technologies, sciences—are built up against a backdrop of historical and institutional traditions, customs, and demands. Institutional theory as promoted modern aesthetics can be applied to any human practice whatsoever.)
12. Imaginative experience. Finally, and perhaps the most important characteristics on this list, objects of art essentially provide an imaginative experience for both producers and audiences. A marble carving may realistically represent an animal, but as a work of sculptural art it becomes imaginative object. The same can be said of any story well told, whether mythology or personal history. The costumed dance by firelight, with its intense unity of purpose among the performers, possesses imaginative element quite beyond the group exercise of factory workers. This is what Kant meant by insisting that a work of art is a “pre sentation” offered up to an imagination that appreciates it irrespective of the existence of a represented object: for Kant, works of art are imaginative subject to disinterested contemplation. All art, in this way, happens make-believe world. This applies to nonimitative, abstract arts as much planning, hypothesizing, inferring the mental states of others, or merely daydreaming is virtually coextensive with normal human