Beauty, Art, and Darwin - The American, A Magazine of Ideas - The Diigo Meta page

• 29 Oct 09
  

  Chris Lott

  Interesting piece discussing _Beauty_ and _The Art Instinct_, both of which take on the fascinating subject of evolutionary aesthetics...

  cosmolinks aesthetics evolution

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  Cochin Blogger

  art beauty

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  Eric Crampton

  As Scruton adds, this “flight from beauty” into sordid sadistic ugliness can be found in many aspects of contemporary culture. There is a self-conscious “desire to spoil beauty in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Desecration is his word for it, and he argues that for a certain kind of nihilistic mind “desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgement we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”
  While I am not religious I tend to agree. And I regret to say that evolutionary aesthetics appears to offer little defence against such nihilism. As the inquiries of critics such as Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun suggested years ago, the purely egoistic activities of attention seeking and making special, and the hyper-individualistic drive for supreme distinction, increasingly take place in a moral void. Ellen Dissanayake writes (Homo Aestheticus, page 59) that “specialness may be strangeness, outrageousness, or extravagance” (my emphasis). So it seems that however outrageous it is, it’s still art, and the sacralizing of making special is fully compatible with the desecration of making vile. Having implied that attention-getting creativity is a good in itself (virtually the summum bonum) Brian Boyd adds correctly that “evolution does not aim at creativity. It aims at nothing.”

• 08 Oct 09
  

  John Zane

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