The Art Instinct
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5116861 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edward Skidelsky (Phillips Exeter Academy, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 109-112 |
| Publication date | 2010-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The British Journal of Aesthetics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-0904 • E-ISSN: 1468-2842 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/aesthj/ayp056 |
| OpenAlex | W1982317581 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
The Art Instinct is the latest of a string of books purporting to explain this or that facet of life in the light of evolution. It argues that art, like language, is native to our species, its basic contours fixed by evolutionary forces long before the dawn of history. The Art Instinct is well written, wide-ranging, and rich in argument and insight. Nonetheless, its central thesis is false, and liable to send aesthetics down a dead-end. Denis Dutton's first task in The Art Instinct is to show that art is a natural kind and not, as often argued, a construction of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Art, as he puts it, is a ‘rich, scattered, and variegated realm of human practice and experience that existed long before philosophers and art theorists’. To capture this messy yet real beast, Dutton draws up a list of twelve ‘cluster criteria’, fulfilment of an unspecified number of which certifies an object or practice as art. Collectively, these twelve criteria define our pre-theoretical understanding of art. They take precedence over anything a Kant or an Arthur Danto has to say on the subject
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Instinct · Linguistics · Natural (archaeology · Object (grammar · Realm · Subject (documents · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Computer Science · History · Philosophy
Making sense of sensory perceptions across languages and cultures
The Systems View of Life
The Case Differential
The psychological birth of art
A social epistemology of aesthetics
Sound and Performance in Public Archaeology
Aesthetics and environmental law
Narrative and Rhetorical Approaches to Problems of Education. Jerome Bruner and Kenneth Burke Revisited
The Origins of the Concept of ‘Palaeolithic Art’
Can George dance? Biosemiotics and human exceptionalism with a lyrebird in the viewfinder
Catching Wrangham
On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means of Artificial Selection; Or, the Preservation of Favored Traces in the Struggle for Existence
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,8 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2018 (8) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |