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摘要
摘要
In a groundbreaking new book that does for art what Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct did for linguistics, Denis Dutton overturns a century of art theory and criticism and revolutionizes our understanding of the arts.
The Art Instinct combines two fascinating and contentious disciplines--art and evolutionary science--in a provocative new work that will change forever the way we think about the arts, from painting to literature to movies to pottery. Human tastes in the arts, Dutton argues, are evolutionary traits, shaped by Darwinian selection. They are not, as the past century of art criticism and academic theory would have it, just "socially constructed."
Our love of beauty is inborn, and many aesthetic tastes are shared across remote cultures--just one example is the widespread preference for landscapes with water and distant trees, like the savannas where we evolved. Using forceful logic and hard evidence, Dutton shows that we must premise art criticism on an understanding of evolution, not on abstract "theory." He restores the place of beauty, pleasure, and skill as artistic values.
Sure to provoke discussion in scientific circles and uproar in the art world, The Art Instinct offers radical new insights into both the nature of art and the workings of the human mind.
评论 (3)
Kirkus评论
Pugnacious, witty and entertaining first book by prolific essayist and critic Dutton (Philosophy of Art/Univ. of Canterbury, New Zealand), who founded the influential blog Arts Letters Daily. Picking up where evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker leave off in their investigations into the origins of human language and other mental phenomena, Dutton argues that the arts toowhy and how they are made, how they are experienced, why in all their myriad forms they are so central to human life in every culture and agecan be explained by Darwinian natural and sexual selection. He plausibly suggests how a nearly universal taste for paintings of rolling landscapes, dotted with trees, bodies of water and animals, may be a relic of our Pleistocene ancestors' evolutionarily successful preference for the savannas of Africa, where game and safe prospects to view it from were plentiful. He makes the case for fiction's origins in the adaptive advantage to our ancestors of imagining scenarios they would not actually have to live through as an aid to planning for survival. He cites work from evolutionary psychologists to show how the art instinct, like the peacock's tail, may have developed as a "fitness signal" to mark the prehistoric artist as an abundantly healthy mate. After a century of criticism that divorced art from ordinary human experienceeither placing its definition in the hands of institutions like museums and university art departments or reducing it to authorless "texts" that defy consistent interpretation from critic to criticDutton wants to shift the discussion about art to more common, solid ground. He treads shakily when he tries to use his Darwinian aesthetics to justify his own (vehemently anti-modernist) tastes, but even those who disagree with these opinions will find his manifesto scintillatingly written and not to be missedeven the end notes are indispensable. Promises to instigate a lively conversation about the origins and meaning of art, not only among the author's peers in academia, but also in the culture at large. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
We talk about the maternal instinct and the mating instinct, why not, asks Dutton, the art instinct? We are a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences, so surely there's a coded-in-our-genes reason for that. Darwinian concepts have been applied with illuminating effect to psychology, history, and politics, why not art? And who better to attempt this mind-expanding analysis than Dutton, a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily, named the best Web site in the world by the Guardian. Creative, nimble, and entertaining, Dutton discusses landscape art, pottery, Aristotle, forgeries, and ready-mades. Rigorous in his definition of the signal characteristics of art and application of evolutionary science, Dutton identifies cross-cultural commonalities in art, explicates our innate feel for images and stories (devoting an entire chapter to the uses of fiction ), and explores art's role in individual expression and community cohesiveness. Marshaling intriguing examples and analogies in a cogent, animated argument destined to provoke debate, Dutton formulates the best answer yet to the question, What's art good for? --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
Choice 评论
Founder and editor of the highly trafficked Web site Arts & Letters Daily , Dutton (Univ. of Canterbury, NZ) proposes a fascinating account of the possible evolutionary roots of aesthetics and the arts. Taking off from a meditation on America's Most Wanted, a painting done in the mid-1990s by expatriate Soviet artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid to satisfy the artistic preferences of Americans as expressed in polls, focus groups, and town hall meetings, he eventually considers the full range of arts, from literature to music, carefully tracing the adaptive and sexually selective benefits in each case. Along the way, he raises many of the central issues of the philosophy of art, including the definition of art, the role of the artist's intention in interpreting and evaluating artworks, the problem of forgery, the paradox of Dada, the nature of aesthetic value, and greatness in art. Dutton's philosophically responsible and illuminating treatment of these in terms of evolutionary aesthetics, written in sprightly and jargon-free prose, cannot fail to interest and perhaps even convince readers who approach this controversial topic with an open mind. Summing Up: Essential. All academic and public libraries. R. Bonzon Augustana College
目录
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 Landscape and Longing | p. 13 |
2 Art and Human Nature | p. 29 |
3 What Is Art? | p. 47 |
4 "But They Don't Have Our Concept of Art" | p. 64 |
5 Art and Natural Selection | p. 85 |
6 The Uses of Fiction | p. 103 |
7 Art and Human Self-Domestication | p. 135 |
8 Intention, Forgery, Dada: Three Aesthetic Problems | p. 164 |
9 The Contingency of Aesthetic Values | p. 203 |
10 Greatness in the Arts | p. 220 |
Acknowledgments | p. 245 |
Notes | p. 247 |
Bibliography | p. 259 |
Index | p. 269 |