The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [8]
Danto’s analysis presupposes that picture preferences are culturally produced and are indefinitely malleable, depending on what our culture makes familiar to us. When we think of a robin (instead of a grebe) asked to imagine a bird, or think of a man (instead of a woman) if asked imagine an airline pi lot, we fall victim to stereo types derived from childhood socialization—our experiences of walking in the park or flying airplanes. For Danto, it all must come down in the end to encultura-tion: there is no category of natural interests in pictorial representations. That would be why,” Danto claims, “when throughout history anything deviated significantly from the predominantly blue landscape, spontaneous response has been that it is not art.” It follows that the villain in the persis tent, worldwide resis tance to modernism—roughly, abstraction—is therefore the world calendar industry: “Why else would Kenyans, for example, come out with the same kind of painting everyone else even though 70 percent of them answered ‘African’ question 37—‘If you had to choose from the following list, which three contentious sentences:
There is nothing in the least African about the Hudson River Biedermeier style of landscape with water. But it may be exactly with reference to such images that Kenyans learned the meaning of art. It is no accident that in the Kenyan questionnaire, response to the question on what types of art people have their homes, 91 percent mentioned prints from calendars though, in fairness, 72 percent mentioned “prints or posters”).
This position on the blue landscapes is consistent and thoughtful. also profoundly wrong. First, an incidental point: it is incorrect to there is nothing African about the landscape in America’s Most Wanted. Remove George Washington, the children, and the deer and, with the apparently deciduous tree in the foreground, the landscape could pass for one of the mountainous areas of East Africa, e. much of Mount Kenya National Park. Speaking of visual stereotypes, Danto himself may be in the thrall of images of the dusty plains that extend from eastern Kenya and into Somalia and Ethiopia, but central Kenya has many areas with mountains, rivers, and lakes. Even if most Kenyans involved with the poll did not live in the mountainous areas, they would know of them.
Danto argues that if Kenyan landscape preferences happen to coincide with Hudson River Biedermeier, it is because Hudson River has somehow been powerfully embedded in African minds. believes he has fingered the source for this: the calendars that 91 percent Africans report having in their homes. Although he momentarily raises the theoretical possibility that a liking for blue landscapes might an innate feature of the human mind, he quickly discards the notion, placing the blame squarely on the calendar industry. In Danto’s frame, African liking for images of a certain type can only be explained exposure to other images, a process of visual enculturation. This is consistent with his art critic’s eye for the issue: he sees America’s Most Wanted in terms of Biedermeier and Hudson River School styles, rather than seeing Komar and Melamid’s painting for what it is as a realist Asia to Africa.
Danto’s certainty that landscape tastes must be acquired by individuals through exposure to images is an unexamined presupposition, and a false one at that. Human and animal life in general may be full of interests, inclinations, and sentiments that are not learned, from the experience either of images or of anything else, though they may be elicited shaped by experience and learning. An example: the window of my office at the New Zealand university where I teach is high, and its ledge offers a con venient perch and nesting place for