The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution »

Denis Dutton founded Arts & Letters Daily and continues to edit the website, one of the Guardian's "best websites in the world," and one of the most heavily trafficked sites anywhere for news and opinion in science, the arts, and politics. He founded and still edits Philosophy and Literature, a highly successful scholarly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed." The human appreciation for art is innate, and certain artistic values are universal across cultures, such as a preference for landscapes that, like the ancient savannah, feature water and distant trees. If people from Africa to Alaska prefer images that would have appealed to our hominid ancestors, what does that mean for the entire discipline of art history? Dutton argues, with forceful logic and hard evidence, that art criticism needs to be premised on an understanding of evolution, not on abstract "theory." Sure to provoke discussion in scientific circles and an 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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

God bless contrarians. When the chumps in the audience start clapping on the downbeat, it's the contrarians who score one for hipness by hitting the backbeat; roving around like members of some cerebral street gang, they buck trends, scorn fashions -- always smirking -- and generally look for a thinker's scrap where first principles can be upended. Contrarianism can, of course, become a lazy fetish; dogmatically taking the unpopular side of every issue is an easy way to get attention, if you don't mind criticism. But at its best, contrarianism means arriving at one's own conclusions -- the best argument wins -- regardless of whether others agree, and especially when they don't. This spirit occasionally produces books that are as bracing as a good, hard slap.

Introduction 1

1 Landscape and Longing 13

2 Art and Human Nature 29

3 What Is Art? 47

4 "But They Don't Have Our Concept of Art" 64

5 Art and Natural Selection 85

6 The Uses of Fiction 103

7 Art and Human Self-Domestication 135

8 Intention, Forgery, Dada: Three Aesthetic Problems 164

9 The Contingency of Aesthetic Values 203

10 Greatness in the Arts 220

Acknowledgments 245

Notes 247

Bibliography 259

Index 269