The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

  Though the exact forms of art vary widely across cultures, the activities of making and appreciating art are recognizable everywhere. The philosopher Denis Dutton has identified seven universal signatures:25

  • Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.

  • Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art’s sake, and don’t demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.

  • Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.

  • Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.

  • Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.

  • Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.

  • Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theater of the imagination.

  The psychological roots of these activities have become a topic of recent research and debate. Some researchers, such as the scholar Ellen Dissanayake, believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the ability to see in depth.26 Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends.27 On this view art is a pleasure technology, like drugs, erotica, or fine cuisine—a way to purify and concentrate pleasurable stimuli and deliver them to our senses. For the discussion in this chapter it does not matter which view is correct. Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties. Here are some of those roots.

  Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors, such as the taste of food, the experience of sex, the presence of children, and the attainment of know-how. Some forms of visual pleasure in natural environments may promote fitness, too. As people explore an environment, they seek patterns that help them negotiate it and take advantage of its contents. The patterns include well-delineated regions, improbable but informative features like parallel and perpendicular lines, and axes of symmetry and elongation. All are used by the brain to carve the visual field into surfaces, group the surfaces into objects, and organize the objects so people can recognize them the next time they see them. Vision researchers such as David Marr, Roger Shepard, and V. S. Ramachandran have suggested that the pleasing visual motifs used in art and decoration exaggerate these patterns, which tell the brain that the visual system is functioning properly and analyzing the world accurately.28 By the same logic, tonal and rhythmic patterns in music may tap into mechanisms used by the auditory system to organize the world of sound.29

  As the visual system converts raw colors and forms to interpretable objects and scenes, the aesthetic coloring of its products gets even richer. Surveys of art, photography, and landscape design, together with experiments on people’s visual tastes, have found recurring motifs in the sights that give people pleasure.30 Some of the motifs may belong to a search image for the optimal human habitat, a savanna: open grassland dotted with trees and bodies of water and inhabited by animals and flowering and fruiting plants. The enjoyment of the forms of living things has been dubbed biophilia by E. O. Wilson, and it appears to be a human universal.31 Other patterns in a landscape may be pleasing because they are signals of safety, such as protected but panoramic views. Still others may be compelling because they are geographic features that make a terrain easy to explore and remember, such as landmarks, boundaries, and paths. The study of evolutionary aesthetics is also documenting the features that make a face or body beautiful.32 The prized lineaments are those that signal health, vigor, and fertility.

  People are imaginative animals who constantly recombine events in their mind’s eye. That ability is one of the engines of human intelligence, allowing us to envision new technologies (such as snaring an animal or purifying a plant extract) and new social skills (such as exchanging promises or finding common enemies).33 Narrative fiction engages this ability to explore hypothetical worlds, whether for edification—expanding the number of scenarios whose outcomes can be predicted—or for pleasure—vicariously experiencing love, adulation, exploration, or victory.34 Hence Horace’s definition of the purpose of literature: to instruct and to delight.

  In good works of art, these aesthetic elements are layered so that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.35 A good landscape painting or photograph will simultaneously evoke an inviting environment and be composed of geometric shapes with pleasing balance and contrast. A compelling story may simulate juicy gossip about desirable or powerful people, put us in an exciting time or place, tickle our language instincts with well-chosen words, and teach us something new about the entanglements of families, politics, or love. Many kinds of art are contrived to induce a buildup and release of psychological tension, mimicking other forms of pleasure. And a work of art is often embedded in a social happening in which the emotions are evoked in many members of a community at the same time, which can multiply the pleasure and grant a sense of solidarity. Dissanayake emphasizes this spiritual part of the art experience, which she calls “making special.”36

  A final bit of psychology engaged by the arts is the drive for status. One of the items on Dutton’s list of the universal signatures of art is impracticality. But useless things, paradoxically, can be highly useful for a certain purpose: appraising the assets of the bearer. Thorstein Veblen first made the point in his theory of social status.37 Since we cannot easily peer into the bank books or Palm Pilots of our neighbors, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste them on luxuries and leisure. Veblen wrote that the psychology of taste is driven by three “pecuniary canons”: conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste. They explain why status symbols are typically objects made by arduous and specialized labor out of rare materials, or else signs that the person is not bound to a life of manual toil, such as delicate and restrictive clothing or expensive and time-consuming hobbies. In a beautiful convergence, the biologist Amotz Zahavi used the same principle to explain the evolution of outlandish ornamentation in animals, such as the tail of the peacock.38 Only the healthiest peacocks can afford to divert nutrients to expensive and cumbersome plumage. The peahen sizes up mates by the splendor of their tails, and evolution selects for males who muster the best ones.

  Though most aficionados are aghast at the suggestion, art—especially elite art—is a textbook example of conspicuous consumption. Almost by definition, art has no practical function, and as Dutton points out in his list, it universally entails virtuosity (a sign of genetic quality, the free time to hone skills, or both) and criticism (which sizes up the worth of the art and the artist). Through most of European history, fine art and sumptuosity went hand in hand, as in the ostentatious decorations of opera and theater halls, the ornate frames around paintings, the formal dress of musicians, and the covers and bindings of old books. Art and artists were under the patronage of aristocrats or of the nouveau riche seeking instant respectability. Today, paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts continue to be sold at exorbitant and much-discussed prices (such as the $82.5 million paid for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet in 1990).

  In The Mating Mind, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic: a way to impress prospective sexual and marriage partners with the quality of one’s brain and thus, indirectly, one’s genes. Artistic virtuosity, he notes, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake, and widely prized. Artists, in other words, are sexy. Nature even gives us a precedent, the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. The males construct elaborate nests and fastidiously decorate them with colorful objects such as orchids, snail shells, berries, and bark. Some of the
m literally paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit residue using leaves or bark as a brush. The females appraise the bowers and mate with the creators of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented ones. Miller argues that the analogy is exact:

  If you could interview a male Satin Bowerbird for Artforum magazine, he might say something like “I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable. I cannot remember when I first developed this raging thirst to present richly saturated color-fields within a monumental yet minimalist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when I indulge these passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I simply must have it for my own. When I see a single shell out of place in my creation, I must put it right…. It is a happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to suggest that I create in order to procreate.” Fortunately, bowerbirds cannot talk, so we are free to use sexual selection to explain their work, without them begging to differ.39

  I am partial to a weaker version of the theory, in which one of the functions (not the only function) of creating and owning art is to impress other people (not just prospective mates) with one’s social status (not just one’s genetic quality). The idea goes back to Veblen and has been amplified by the art historian Quentin Bell and by Tom Wolfe in his fiction and nonfiction.40 Perhaps its greatest champion today is the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that connoisseurship of difficult and inaccessible works of culture serves as a membership badge in society’s upper strata.41 Remember that in all these theories, proximate and ultimate causes may be different. As with Miller’s bowerbird, status and fitness need not enter the minds of people who create or appreciate art; they may simply explain how an urge for self-expression and an eye for beauty and skill evolved.

  Regardless of what lies behind our instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Hume noted that “the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature…. the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London.”42 Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic really can be discerned beneath the variation across cultures. Dutton comments:

  It is important to note how remarkably well the arts travel outside their home cultures: Beethoven and Shakespeare are beloved in Japan, Japanese prints are adored by Brazilians, Greek tragedy is performed worldwide, while, much to the regret of many local movie industries, Hollywood films have wide cross-cultural appeal…. Even Indian music…, while it sounds initially strange to the Western ear, can be shown to rely on rhythmic pulse and acceleration, repetition, variation and surprise, as well as modulation and divinely sweet melody: in fact, all the same devices found in Western music.43

  One can extend the range of the human aesthetic even further. The Lascaux cave paintings, crafted in the late old Stone Age, continue to dazzle viewers in the age of the Internet. The faces of Nefertiti and Botticelli’s Venus could appear on the cover of a twenty-first-century fashion magazine. The plot of the hero myth found in countless traditional cultures was transplanted effectively into the Star Wars saga. Western museum collectors plundered the prehistoric treasures of Africa, Asia, and the Americas not to add to the ethnographic record but because their patrons found the works beautiful to gaze at.

  A wry demonstration of the universality of basic visual tastes came from a 1993 stunt by two artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who used marketing research polls to assess Americans’ taste in art.44 They asked respondents about their preferences in color, subject matter, composition, and style, and found considerable uniformity. People said they liked realistic, smoothly painted landscapes in green and blue containing animals, women, children, and heroic figures. To satisfy this consumer demand, Komar and Melamid painted a composite of the responses: a lakeside landscape in a nineteenth-century realist style featuring children, deer, and George Washington. That’s mildly amusing, but no one was prepared for what came next. When the painters replicated the polling in nine other countries, including Ukraine, Turkey, China, and Kenya, they found pretty much the same preferences: an idealized landscape, like the ones on calendars, and only minor substitutions from the American standard (hippos instead of deer, for example). What is even more interesting is that these McPaintings exemplify the kind of landscape that had been characterized as optimal for our species by researchers in evolutionary aesthetics.45

  The art critic Arthur Danto had a different explanation: Western calendars are marketed all over the world, just like the rest of Western culture and art.46 To many intellectuals, the globalization of Western styles is proof that tastes in art are arbitrary. People show similar aesthetic preferences, they claim, only because Western ideals have been exported to the world by imperialism, global business, and electronic media. There may be some truth to this, and for many people it is the morally correct position because it implies that there is nothing superior about Western culture or inferior about the indigenous ones it is replacing.

  But there is another side to the story. Western societies are good at providing things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and abundant food, rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these goods and services not from benevolence but from self-interest, namely the profits to be made in selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also perfected ways of giving people what they like—in this case, art forms that appeal to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Hollywood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the West, it may be not an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic. This all sounds very parochial and Eurocentric, and I wouldn’t push it too far, but it must have an element of truth: if there is a profit to be made in appealing to global human tastes, it would be surprising if entrepreneurs hadn’t taken advantage of it. And it isn’t as Eurocentric as one might think. Western culture, like Western technology and Western cuisine, is voraciously eclectic, appropriating any trick that pleases people from any culture it encounters. An example is one of America’s most important culture exports, popular music. Ragtime, jazz, rock, blues, soul, and rap grew out of African American musical forms, which originally incorporated African rhythms and vocal styles.

  So WHAT HAPPENED in 1910 that supposedly changed human nature? The event that stood out in Virginia Woolf’s recollection was a London exhibition of the paintings of the post-Impressionists, including Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and van Gogh. It was an unveiling of the movement called modernism, and when Woolf wrote her declaration in the 1920s, the movement was taking over the arts.

  Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were “machines for living” made of industrial materials in boxy shapes. Modernist architecture culminated both in the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations and in the dreary high-rises of American housing projects, postwar Briti
sh council flats, and Soviet apartment blocks.

  Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the naïve bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place. And science, supposedly, was offering the same message. According to the version that trickled into the humanities, Freud showed that behavior springs from unconscious and irrational impulses, Einstein showed that time and space can be defined only relative to an observer, and Heisenberg showed that the position and momentum of an object were inherently uncertain because they were affected by the act of observation. Much later, this embroidery of physics inspired the famous hoax in which the physicist Alan Sokal successfully published a paper filled with gibberish in the journal Social Text.47

  But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda. In a review of a book defending the mission of modernism, the critic Frederick Turner explains them:

  The great project of modern art was to diagnose, and cure, the sickness unto death of modern humankind…. [Its artistic mission] is to identify and strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive framing provided by conformist mass commercial society, and to make us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our peeled and rejuvenated senses. This therapeutic work is also a spiritual mission, in that a community of such transformed human beings would, in theory, be able to construct a better kind of society. The enemies of the process are cooptation, commercial exploitation and reproduction, and kitsch…. Fresh, raw experience—to which artists have an unmediated and childlike access—is routinized, compartmentalized, and dulled into insensibility by society.48