Download The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution AudioBook Free
The Art work Instinct combines two of the very most interesting and contentious disciplines, fine art and evolutionary technology, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way fine art itself is identified. Aesthetic style, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is designed by natural selection. It isn't, as virtually all contemporary fine art criticism and academics theory would have it, "socially constructed". The real human appreciation for fine art is innate, and certain artistic values are widespread across cultures, such as a preference for panoramas that, like the old savannah, feature drinking water and distant trees and shrubs. If folks from Africa to Alaska prefer images that could have appealed to our hominid ancestors, exactly what does that mean for the entire discipline of fine art record? Dutton argues, with forceful reasoning and hard facts, that fine art criticism must be premised on an understanding of progression, not on abstract "theory". Certain to provoke conversation in clinical circles and an uproar in the fine art world, The Art work Instinct offers radical new insights into both the nature of fine art and the workings of the real human mind.
