Darwin in the Louvre

Zbigniew Janowski reviews Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution :

The human artistic drive is as old as the species itself. The famous Lascaux cave paintings in France show that even at the earliest stages man had an urge for expression beyond utilitarian needs. Objects are made to be useful, but what produces beautiful objects?

This is the question that belongs to the difficult realm of aesthetics, and Denis Dutton’s Art Instinct is an attempt to explain the origin of creativity by applying the Darwinian theory of evolution to art. Art, he thinks, is an expression of an instinct that developed during a long evolutionary process—”by-products of adaptations.”

Dutton’s book is rich in a variety of topics, and it is written with clarity, covering such areas as “landscape and longing,” “art and human nature,” “what is art?” “art and natural selection,” and “art and human self-domestication.” Not all are of equal value, and not all seem to support a Darwinian interpretation. The evolutionary claim, which Dutton makes very forcefully in his introduction, seems to be so watered down by side discussions that the interesting thesis ends up looking somewhat marginal.