FROM THE LIBRARY
The
Art
Instinct
a review
By Ashley P. Taylor
Managing Editor
Denis Dutton. Photo by Jurvetson (flickr).
Humans all over the world have made visual
art, told stories, played music, danced, and left
evidence that they have been doing these things
for a very long time. Art-making began with our
hunter-gather ancestors who lived in the Pleistocene geological era, (1.8 million to 11,700 years
ago), which ended with the last Ice Age. The
Lascaux cave paintings are thought to be about
17,000 years old; the Venus sculptures, stone
carvings of rotund, probably pregnant women,
are as many as 35,000 years old. It seems that
we had some instinct toward the arts. Does that
instinct make evolutionary sense? Might it have
helped some of our ancestors to survive and
reproduce, assuring that artistic tendencies, to
the extent that they were genetically encoded,
were preserved through natural selection?
These are questions that the late Denis Dutton,
founder of Arts & Letters Daily and professor
at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand,
asked in his 2009 book, The Art Instinct.
audience member, reader, or observer. There’s
the instinct to make art oneself. Then there are
the instincts governing what we find attractive,
pleasing, or beautiful.
Art instincts can come in many forms. There’s
the instinct to like and appreciate art as an
Dutton points out that these kinds of landscape scenes are found in calendars every year
SciArt in America October 2014
Dutton opens with the idea that we like art
that portrays conditions favorable for human
life. A 1993 survey by artists Vitaly Komar and
Alexander Melamid found that people worldwide prefer paintings that include water, humans, and animals. Dutton cites psychological
studies supporting the idea that people have
innate landscape preferences and that people
prefer savanna-like landscapes resembling those
that early humans would have occupied. When
it comes to defining beauty in the human form,
Dutton explains, people are attracted to features that signify health (symmetry), and fertility (curviness in women). That people would be
attracted to conditions of health and well being,
in art or otherwise, makes evolutionary sense.
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