The Art Instinct
Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
by Denis Dutton · first published 2008
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2011–2022first – last mentioned
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…different levels of worth to two artifacts that were totally identical, save for their method of construction? I didn't have a good answer to this until I read a book by aesthetician Dennis Dutton (The Art Instinct). Dutton presents a 12 factor model of art, and claims that artifacts exhibiting all 12 criteria tend to be unambiguously judged as "valid art", while artifacts that miss some but exhibit most are considered…
on “Context Free Art” ↗…criteria can also be translated to: usefulness, simplicity, averageness (I used the example: if the man on the street can read your python code and understand it, you did a good job), cleverness [1]: The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton [2]: http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_...
on “Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty” ↗…Very young children “can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories,” distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. “Not only does the artistic structure of stories speak to Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming…
on “Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction” ↗Ideas similar to this are explored by Denis Dutton in The Art Instinct (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Instinct-Beauty-Pleasure-Evolution...). The basic idea, in one sentence, is that our preferences in art are a result of our ancestral environment. He cover various ways in…
on “Universal Property of Music Discovered” ↗…very young children “can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories,” distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. One of my favorite quotes comes to mind: “Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” — Euripides
on “Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction” ↗I have a lot of sympathy with this article's main point of view, that art has has its roots in the biological evolution of the human species. The author references a book by Denis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution[1] - where Dutton argues that art is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. That book was published in 2010; I wrote a (short) article in 2007…
on “Art is Fundamentally Social (2021)” ↗