Welcome,
New User!
New User!
The Art Instinct
By: Denis DuttonImprint: Bloomsbury Press
Format: ePub Encrypted (DRM)
Earn $0.50 - Write a Review »
Our Price
$9.30
Reward Money:
$0.32
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.
Share your thoughts on the The Art Instinct Art & Music eBook with others!
| Title of eBook: The Art Instinct | |
| Release Date: 07-01-2009 | |
| Publisher: Bloomsbury Press |
This eBook download is available in the following formats:
| Parent title | The Art Instinct |
|---|---|
| Encrypted (DRM) | Yes |
| SKU | 9781608191932 |
| File size | 612 |
| Internet Security | n/a |
| Printing | Not allowed |
| Copying | Not allowed |
| Read aloud | No Sys requirements Download reader |
| Devices | Samsung Tablet, Apple Ipad & Iphone, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, Aluratek Libre, Iliad, Nokia, Blackberry, Hanlin |
| Note | ePub, short for electronic publication is one of our favorites and should be yours for a couple of reasons. ePub offers reflowable text giving you flexibility to manipulate how the content is presented. Moreover, lots of cool features are now being developed for the reader like advanced video and audio. ePub is now an industry standard, so all of the "non-propreitary" hardware manufacturers are now supporting it. |
The Art Instinct
Chapter One
Landscape and Longing
I
America's Most Wanted was an audacious painting, even by the inflated standards of the contemporary art scene. In 1993, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, expatriate Soviet artists who had settled in the United States, received money from the Nation Institute to study the artistic preferences of people in ten countries. They oversaw a detailed worldwide poll, conducted for them in the United States by Marttila & Kiley and by various other public opinion firms overseas. In some locales, the polls were followed up with town hall meetings and focus groups. All participants were asked what they would like to see a picture of, whether they preferred interior or landscape scenes, what kinds of animals they liked, favorite colors, what sorts of people they enjoyed seeing depicted-famous or ordinary, clothed or nude, young or old-and so forth. Extrapolated to the general populations of the countries polled, the graphs and tables of figures produced by Komar and Melamid's People's Choice project claimed, not unreasonably, to be a reliable report on the artistic preferences of "close to two billion people."
But this project produced more than numerical preferences: these talented artists (they were originally trained as socialist realists) then went on actually to paint most-wanted and least-wanted paintings for every country in the study-pastiches based on favorite colors, shapes, and subject matters for each nationality.
The least-wanted paintings are bad news for anyone hoping someday to see modernist abstraction achieve mass accepta
...
