The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton, Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $27.50
Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity, by Ben-Ami Scharfstein, University of Chicago Press, 543 pages, $35 U.S.
Reviewed here: Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution , by Denis Dutton; Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity , by Ben-Ami Scharfstein
Enlightened common sense is a rare thing in the discussion of art, which tends to lurch between “my three-year-old could have drawn that” and solemn explications of a can of an artist's feces as an important statement about authorship and the production of art.
Which makes Denis Dutton seem like a bit of a relief. The founder of everyone's favourite homepage, Arts & Letters Daily, Dutton makes the case that the propensity to make and enjoy art of all sorts can be traced, in most cases fairly directly, to the East African savannah of the early Pleistocene era, where we all started out. In one of his most satisfying formulations, he says the persistence of monsters in our art, from Grendel to St. George's dragon, Ushi-oni to Jaws and Where the Wild Things Are , are not reflections of our ids, not externalizations of our insecurities or even symbols of the devil. They're just monsters, like the ones that used to eat us on the savannah.
“Story plots are not, therefore, unconscious archetypes,” Dutton explains, “but structures that inevitably follow, as Aristotle realized and Darwinian aesthetics can explain, from an instinctual desire to tell stories about the basic features of the human predicament.”
But it's more statement than explanation. There is no equivalent to the fossil record when it comes to reasons thousands of generations of people have done what they've done and enjoyed what they've enjoyed. It makes sense, and the more Dutton adduces, describing global preferences in landscape painting in terms of the safest and most protein-rich East African terrain, the more sense it makes.
The most powerful tool in Dutton's belt is Darwin's second seminal work, The Descent of Man , which describes his theories of sexual selection. Big and practically unnecessary vocabularies, Dutton says, are not about communication at all, but just the human equivalent of peacock tails, flashy outward signifiers of a superior intelligence that would make us better breeding material. The reason we recoil at forgeries is all about art being a skill display that allows us to assess someone's intelligence, dexterity and capacity for problem-solving, in order, once again, to determine the best vessel through which to propel our genes.
Dutton uses this no-nonsense approach to take down any number of bugbears, from literary theorists to museum curators, who would have us believe that art is complicated and culturally determined. Clive Bell's notions about the primacy of colour and form in painting, Arthur Danto and his admiration for Duchamp's ready-mades as “transfigurations of the commonplace,” literary theorists and anyone who has “confused the pleasures of argumentative discourse … with the pleasures of art” are summarily dismissed. “If they were right,” he writes, “then any stimulating book of aesthetic theory would be a work of art.”
The one weakness, and it's a big one, is that it's all by definition guesswork. Words like “probably” and “very likely” dot the book. This is more of a problem than it might be because Dutton often states his case with a scientific certainty he is not able to support, and in the process makes claims it is actually fairly easy to dispute, like the importance of setting to the appeal of film, or circular arguments that contend that if we like doing something, such as let an artist's biography dictate our approach to his work, it is because we are bound by Darwinian psychology to like doing this and it is therefore right and good.
For some, the fact that Dutton's theories, unlike much discussion of art, focus on why we like what we do like rather than why what we don't like is art and important will be enough to bridge the few leaps of faith required to follow this generally persuasive, articulate, sensible man. For others, there is Ben-Ami Scharfstein.
In some ways, the American-born, Tel Aviv-based philosophy professor is Dutton's opposite. He's a shower, not a teller. And he has a lot to show. I have never seen such an impressive array of historically, geographically and culturally diverse evidence brought to bear on any subject. Though both make the same basic point, that art is not as complicated as some would have us believe, unlike Dutton, who wants to explain why, Scharfstein merely wants to show us what. The result is a tsunami of data, from the beginning of recorded history to the present, from Rembrandt to the Xavante of Brazil's Mato Grosso.
