Books I'm Reading: The Art Instinct

I just finished Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press, 2009), a book I picked up remaindered somewhere just because it looked interesting--and it was.

Dutton looks at art, beauty, and pleasure from an evolutionary perspective. That simple sentence would be enough to set off alarms in some quarters--notably among feminists, always wary (and probably rightly so) of anything that might suggest cultural (often male-dominated) norms are somehow determined by evolution (and therefore unassailable) or that mainstream pop-culture ideas about beauty are innate and therefore inevitable. However, Dutton is not a polemicist and he's mostly not making claims about what specifically is and is not beautiful. He is talking more about broad tendencies that go across cultural boundaries. He is less concerned with particular instances of preferences in beauty and art than in arguing that we do, in fact, have preferences, that they appear to be nearly universal, and that the existence of preferences has been adaptive in an evolutionary sense. I think feminists would have relatively little to take offense at here, although I'm willing to admit that, being a man, I may be insufficiently sensitive.

Acknowledging that evolutionary psychology can be rather too easily used to justify existing cultural constructs, I think Dutton has much useful and interesting to say about both people and art. He starts by asking one of many interesting questions: Why should discussions of art be excluded from examination from a Darwinian perspective when so many other fields have advanced through just such a view? As Dutton puts it, "The evolution of Homo sapiens in the last million years is not just a history of how we came to have acute color vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait. It is also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and enrapture ourselves, from children's games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens." In fact, he argues against the view that feminists seem to fear. Defining art quite broadly to include a wide array of images and creative endeavors (for example, calendar photos), not only what we call "fine arts," he suggests, for example, that tastes in landscapes "are not just products of social conditioning, stemming from manipulative choices made by calendar manufacturers (or by landscape artists); rather people who make and sell calendars are catering to prehistoric tastes shared by their customers across the globe." As the title of the book suggests, the main point Dutton makes is that the need to create art is potent and universal--we instinctively create art--and, to understand that, we must assume that the presence of an art instinct has been an adaptive advantage.

There isn't room in a short review to cover all the arguments in the book, but I applaud the author for attempting to define art--a daunting task--even if I don't agree entirely with the criteria he chooses (for example, his list of traits common to what we call art would seem to slight abstract art and to exclude art created by atheists). The chapter on fiction--storytelling--was especially thought-provoking, and I enjoyed the sections that dealt with artistic intention (does the artist's intent have a legitimate bearing on how we evaluate a work of art?), with notions of originality in art (why do we treat forgeries and originals differently?), with the difference between an art and a craft, and with kitsch. For Dutton, these questions are important because they shed light on aspects of the adaptive advantages of an art instinct. This is the sort of book that's hard to digest on first reading. I suspect I'll read it again. Recommended.