Review: Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury Press, New York: 2009), ISBN 978-1-59691-401-8, $25.00

Certainly Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct is not the first book of its kind, nor is it by far the first I have read. It is, however, one of the best. Much Darwinian aesthetics have dealt with art as an adaptive feature – and that is where problems arise. Dutton, however, reminds us that Darwin not only came up with the theory of natural selection, but also with the theory of sexual selection. It is this theory, he convincingly claims, that helps explain the origin of the arts.

Does this mean that Da Vinci was just trying to get laid when he painted The Last Supper? Of course not – even if Picasso’s developing a new artistic style with each new wife, girlfriend, or mistress suggests that he was using art for that, among other, reasons. To assume that just because art had its origin as a form of sexual display that art as now practiced is “just about sex,” is to commit the reductionist fallacy. Nor does Dutton make this claim. Though a trait may have had one kind of origin, that does not mean the trait remains tethered to that origin. The earliest feathers, being small, suggested they were retained because they helped with thermoregulation. It was only over time that they were used for flight and sexual displays as well. They arose through natural selection, but have developed certain characteristics – bright colors and impressive displays – through sexual selection. While the two may sometimes appear to work against each other (as in the peacock’s train of feathers), they often work in succession.

It is on this point where I think Dutton in fact falls short, when he rejects the idea that the arts contribute to social cohesion. He points to the fact that as a sexual display, the arts would necessarily foster tensions among rivals – but that does not preclude paradoxical expressions like group dances that are in fact sexual displays. Several years ago when I was visiting Greece, I saw a group dance that consisted of teenaged boys dressed in traditional costumes dancing together in a line, holding scarves between them. They leapt and danced and were clearly trying to outdo each other, while at the same time, dancing together. Dancing together, they reinforced the social cohesion of the town; dancing competitively, they demonstrated their physical fitness to the watching women. The dance only acted to reinforce this natural social tension. Which should not be surprising, since beauty itself constitutes the affirmation of paradox.

The arts thus emerge as a form of sexual display, demonstrating mental fitness and/or physical fitness (as with the dancers), but can and do get entangled with other elements of society, ranging from religion to education. While Dutton does correct for the tendency of Darwinian art theorists to stick to Pleistocene explanations, he only does so by brining us to the Modern Era. In doing so, he is able to justify Duchamp’s Fountain as a form of intellectual art, but I think a lot is missed. What indeed are we to make of the apparent connection between religion and the arts as far back as we have artifacts? Indeed, the separation of the arts from religion only occurred in a significant way during the Renaissance, and coincided with the Reformation and its emphasis on iconoclasm. Shouldn’t an evolutionary theory of the arts take into consideration the last 10,000 years? To do so, one may have to consider other evolutionary psychological theories than just evolutionary psychology, such as Clare Graves’ theory of psychosocial development, more popularly known as Spiral Dynamics. Much has changed since the Pleistocene, and Darwinian aesthetics needs to take that into consideration. It seems unlikely that human nature has “been fixed only since the advent of agriculture and cities, the events that initiated our present epoch, the Holocene, around ten thousand years ago” (41). Much of it – perhaps most of it – but all of it?  It seems unlikely that genetic changes in response to such a rapidly changing environment as that created by humans have not been occurring. We must begin in the Pleistocene – one could even argue that one could begin with the territorial lobe-finned fish that are the common ancestors of all land vertebrates – but one cannot end there. Not just deep sources of our behaviors, but more recent developments deserve explanation.

Another exclusion is the work of Frederick Turner. One would think that his work with Ernst Pöppel in “The Neural Lyre” showing that poetic line lengths were between 3-5 seconds long, and that the auditory present (our short term memory slot) is also 3-5 seconds would be the kind of explanation Darwinists would latch on to. One could also point to Turner’s suggestion that one way of judging a story to be great is to see how many human universals it deals with. These omissions, in light of Dutton’s concerns with evolution and human universals, seems odd.

 All of this having been said, both artists and art theorists need this book as a corrective to much of what has happened over the past century. For one, art is not just “high art.” Also, Dutton affirms that, yes, indeed, there is an author, who does have some sort of intent. He affirms that, yes, there are human and cultural universals. And he thus affirms that we can understand each other across cultures. There is a place for understanding cultural differences, but we must remember that those differences are variations on a set of common themes. There may be Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. (and their varieties), but they are all identifiably religions. Poetry, regardless of language or culture (some postmodern “verse” being likely exceptions), is identifiable as poetry. Etc. He points out too that the issues raised in the arts, and the “problems” identified by so many theorists of the last half century, are products of human nature, not of “capitalism.” Such corrections to art theory are desperately needed to move us out of the cul-de-sac of postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, neo-Marxist, neo-feminist, etc. theory. At the very least, Darwinian aesthetics promises to ameliorate their excesses. And that can only be a good thing.