Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, gave an interesting talk on the evolutionary reasons for our appreciation for beauty at TED. It was brilliantly illustrated on a white board by Andrew Park.
But my friend James Gurney (creator of the Dinotopia series, and author of the new book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter), took issue with Dutton’s theory:
Dutton doesn’t dig very deeply into the nature and the range of the core aesthetic responses, and why those responses might be evolutionarily adaptive. He makes rather unsupportable claims about how he thinks Homo Erectus responded to hand axes. How does he know the axes were art objects? Maybe they were used as money, not art. And how does he know Homo Erectus didn’t have language?
Dutton’s theory also proposes that natural selection provides for a repulsion reaction to such dangerous things as standing at the edge a cliff. How, then, would Dutton’s theory account for the experience of the sublime, as formulated by aesthetic philosophers such as Edmund Burke? According to Burke, we’re attracted, rather than repulsed, by unsettling and disquieting experiences. (Example: Wanderer by Caspar David Friedrich.)
Far more convincing–and useful– is Tolstoy’s notion that art is the deliberate transmission of emotion. It applies to dance, theater, painting, music, and all other forms. And it is immensely practical to the working artist, because it provides a clear test for the aesthetic value of a particular work. Tolstoy’s theory is a rich topic, perhaps fodder for a future post.
James Gurney on Denis Dutton’s Darwinian theory of beauty