The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [6]
But then, the whole idea that art worlds are monadically sealed from one another is daft. Do we need to be reminded that Chopin loved in Korea, that Spaniards collect Japanese prints, or that Cervantes read in Chicago and Shakespeare enjoyed in China? Not to mention music and Hollywood movies, which have swept the world. the time is right for a reexamination from the widest possible perspective aesthetic plea sure and achievement. Indeed, bringing an understanding evolution to bear on art can enhance our enjoyment of it. A determination shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path. Darwinian study of art as not only a cultural phenomenon, but a natural one I hope I have done justice both to him and to the great artists whose achievements so captivate us.
CHAPTER 1
Landscape and Longing
I
America’s Most Wanted was an audacious painting, even by the inflated standards of the contemporary art scene. In 1993, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, expatriate Soviet artists who had settled in United States, received money from the Nation Institute to study artistic preferences of people in ten countries. They oversaw a detailed worldwide poll, conducted for them in the United States by Marttila Kiley and by various other public opinion firms overseas. In some the polls were followed up with town hall meetings and focus groups. All participants were asked what they would like to see a picture whether they preferred interior or landscape scenes, what kinds animals they liked, favorite colors, what sorts of people they enjoyed seeing depicted—famous or ordinary, clothed or nude, young or old— so forth. Extrapolated to the general populations of the countries polled, the graphs and tables of figures produced by Komar and Melamid’s People’s Choice project claimed, not unreasonably, to be a reliable report on the artistic preferences of “close to two billion people.”
But this project produced more than numerical preferences: these talented artists (they were originally trained as socialist realists) then went actually to paint most-wanted and least-wanted paintings for every country in the study—pastiches based on favorite colors, shapes, and subject matters for each nationality.
The least-wanted paintings are bad news for anyone hoping someday to see modernist abstraction achieve mass ac cep tance. People in almost all nations disliked abstract designs, especially jagged shapes created with a thick impasto in the commonly despised colors of gold, orange, yellow, and teal. This cross-cultural similarity of negative opinion was matched on the positive side by another remarkable uniformity of sentiment: almost without exception, the most-wanted painting was landscape with water, people, and animals. Since the overwhelmingly favorite color in the world turned out to be blue, Komar and Melamid used blue as the dominant color of their landscapes. Their America’s Most Wanted, the painting based on the poll results from the United States, combined a typical American preference for historical figures, children, and wild animals by placing George Washington on a grassy area beside an attractive river or lake. Near him walk three clean-youngsters, looking like vacationers at Disneyland; to their right two deer cavort, while in the water behind Washington a hippopotamus bellows.
To consider the survey seriously and then turn to Komar Melamid’s painted results is to realize you’ve been conned. It is as though the Nation Institute had been persuaded by two clever chefs to commission an expensive poll to determine America’s most-wanted food. chefs study the resulting statistical preferences—a highly varied list nevertheless topped by ice cream, pizza, hamburgers, and chocolate