Feb
16
The Art Instinct
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“How far back can the history of art go? The Lascaux cave paintings in southwestern France are thought to be some 16,000 years old. The Venus of Willendorf, a plump and bosomy statuette from lower Austria, may be about 9,000 years older. A few coarse figurines — found in Morocco, the Golan Heights and other places — may be several dozen millenniums more ancient still.But some psychologists argue that the origins of art should be sought much further back. They look to the Pleistocene epoch, which began about 1.6 million years ago, when — in the course of some 80,000 generations of surviving and mating — our ancestors may have evolved the instincts that led eventually to the works of Bach, Rembrandt and Proust. ‘Darwinian aesthetics’ is what Denis Dutton, the author of ‘The Art Instinct,’ calls this idea, and he thinks its time has come.”
Sounds like a fascinating book- interesting “that the sorts of landscape pictures preferred by 8-year-olds around the world seem to mirror the types of flat, savannah-like vistas in which their distant ancestors may well have thrived.”
More of Anthony Gottlieb’s excellent NY Times review. Also, briefly noted in The New Yorker.
As Gottlieb points out, Dutton spends some time on forgery and plagiarism (see earlier essay on the subject). We’ll post more on his thoughts here- especially around found art. In an essay on his website he writes:
“But by now it should be obvious that the strict demarcation between art and craft as I’ve begun to explain it exists only in the philosopher’s imagination. In the first place, almost all traditionally acknowledged art involves, indeed, requires craft, requires the application of technique. At least it has historically, and the training for practitioners in all of the arts has involved the mastery of techniques (though this differs among the arts: training as a musician requires a more rigourous and structured course of technical preparation than training as a novelist — writing good novels isn’t any easier than playing the piano well, but the training for it is less routinised). Thus for the last 2500 years it might be said at least that craft of some sort has been considered a necessary condition for artistic practice — a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. And in this respect, one way to understand the appearance of Found Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art on the modern scene. All of these movements are in part attacks on the very place of craft in art — attempts to produce art without craft. (For that very reason, among others, I believe these schools of art do not have a vital future ahead of them. )”
I wonder- is there not craft in Duchamp’s selection of an item, for instance, or in other forms of found art? Not going indict Dutton on this point without reading his book, but seems he’s less than charitable on this subject.
Dutton on Brian Lehrer Show: