The Art Instinct

Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution

By Denis Dutton

"If you care about art writ large as a miraculous bounty for the world, or only for your own selfish sake, The Art Instinct should impress you as the most shrewd, precisely written and provocative study you'll find on its topic's place in human nature." -Philadelphia Inquirer

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.

Reviews/Media for The Art Instinct

Denis Dutton wrote a story for the Daily Beast about the Christchurch Earthquake.

Listen for Denis will be on the Veronica Rueckert Show on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow 9/10 AM.

“The Art Instinct is a brisk, bracingly confident performance… an unusually stimulating venture in aesthetics… ”—Julian Bell, New York Review of Books Read full review.

“[Dutton's] discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating he touches on all the major issues of aesthetics in this fairly short book and invariably illuminates them. Dutton's eloquent account sheds light on the role art plays in our lives, whatever its ultimate origins”—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review Read full review.

“Denis Dutton argues that humankind's universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language, all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In The Art Instinct, Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations, read Dutton's book: his masterful knowledge of art and his compelling prose make it a thing of beauty.”—James Q. Wilson, Newsweek Read full review.

“Artistic predilection isn’t a social or cultural construction; it’s a downright Darwinian imperative. That’s the provocative thesis teased and tested in this punchy tract, a hard-hitting amalgamation of critical theory and evolutionary science. Tempering his contentious passion with winning doses of empiricism and good cheer, Dutton—the essayist, academic, public-radio enthusiast, and founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily—seeks a way around “the hermetic discourse that deadens so much of the humanities.” Treading a path strewn with evolutionary psychology, prehistoric extrapolations, and other cross-cultural interpretations—and interpreters like Pinker and Gould—that he deems outmoded, the author takes a cluster-concept approach, arguing fluently that artistic creation, apprehension, and appreciation (like language, sexuality, and religion) are largely, if not wholly, chromosomal; that they are far more innate and biological than absorbed or accidental. While Dutton doesn’t spring all the aesthetic prisoners of postmodern thought, he does liberate many—or at least make the idea of a jailbreak from abstractionism seem both cogent and exhilarating.” —Atlantic

"An important book that raises questions often avoided in contemporary aesthetics and art criticism. He has woven a powerful plea for the notion that art expresses a longing to see through the performance or object to another human personality." —Michael S. Roth, Los Angeles Times Read full review.

A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title of 2009

Listen to author Denis Dutton's interview on The Bob Edwards Show.

Denis will be appearing at the Aspen Ideas Festival this summer. For more information, click.

"As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct, people the world over are weirdly driven to create beautiful things. Dutton is an elegant writer, and his book should be admired for its attempt to close the gap between art and science."—Jonah Lerner, Washington Post Book World, Read full review.

Dutton included in an interesting article about music in Washington Times Read review.

Dutton’s NPR On Point interview now online here.

Another mention in an New York Times story.

“engaging...the book is ultimately animated less by its grand thesis than by all the questions tossed up along the way...why did no art form develop to exploit smell, as music does hearing?...and by Dutton's infectious and wide-ranging love of art, a passion that clearly goes beyond anything that could be considered an adaptive trait.”— The New Yorker Read full review .

Why everyone is an artist “Denis Dutton says evolutionary psychology explains the ubiquity of art across cultures and eons." Read full review.”—Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"When it comes to the Darwinian competition that is book marketing, Dutton actually has two secrets: sex and the Internet." — Bob Thompson, Washington Post Read full review.

Online feature at Forbes

"Vigorous and wonderfully provocative"—News and Observer Read full review.

"A substantial contribution to the debate we ought to be having."—New Scientist Read full review.

"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.

"The Art Instinct gives a comprehensive survey of the field, written with fluency, wit, and wide erudition."—John Derbyshire, New Criterion

Showing off the life of the mind “Denis Dutton sketches out our innate artistry...” Read full review.”—Robert Fulford, National Post

“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 too why 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 age can 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 experience, either 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 critic, ”Dutton 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 missed, even 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.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“Art theory assumes that our aesthetic tastes are conditioned by the culture in which we live. But does genetic programming have more to do with it than we think?”—New Statesman Read article.

“For those wary of biological explanations of human behavior, "The Art Instinct" makes for a refreshing read. A philosophy professor in New Zealand and the founder of the respected web site Arts & Letters Daily, Denis Dutton is no reductionist; his view of art would preserve all that is unique, challenging, and revelatory - in a word, human - about our creative and expressive activities.” —Matthew Battles, Boston Globe Read full review.

“As a professor of the philosophy of art (at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand) and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily, the go-to site for the world's procrastinating intellectuals, Dutton represents an important conduit between the frequently combative fields of science and the humanities. Quite apart from its timeliness for Darwin's bicentennial, the book deserves a look because it's the latest in a long, long line of attempts to bring art and science together in a way that doesn't leave one—or both—with a black eye.”—Jeremy McCarter, Newsweek Read full review.