DOES EVOLUTION LEAD US TO LOVE LANDSCAPES?

DOES EVOLUTION LEAD US TO LOVE LANDSCAPES? Jonah Lehrer reviews Dennis Dutton’s new book, THE ART INSTINCT, which argues that our instinct for art and desire for beauty are the result of the evolutionary process. Lehrer describes how Dutton takes as a starting point an experiment from the early 1990’s. People in ten countries were surveyed on what they liked in a painting. “In each country, people craved a painting that featured a large body of blue water, some open grass, a human figure and a few animals.” There were national difference in the details (Russians liked a brown bear; Kenyans liked a hippo). “According to Dutton, the survey results reveal our hard-wired preferences, which developed when we were Pleistocene hunter-gatherers roaming the African savannah.” If we are programmed by evolution to enjoy landscapes, then it is all the more remarkable that landscapes should have, as Jacki Wullschlager says, disappeared from the contemporary art scene. Lehrer concludes that the rejection of landscape invalidates Dutton’s evolutionary theory of art: “when everything in the Museum of Modern Art violates your theory of aesthetics, then it might be worth revising the theory.”