Up The Arts

A REFUTATION OF DENIS DUTTON, PART 3

November 16, 2009 – 6:42 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

‘Thou read the book, my pretty Vivien!

O ay, it is but twenty pages long,

But every page having an ample marge,

And every marge enclosing in the midst

A square of text that looks a little blot,

The text no larger than the limbs of fleas;

And every square of text an awful charm,

Writ in a language that has long gone by.

So long, that mountains have arisen since

With cities on their flanks – thou read the book!

And every margin scribbled, crost, and crammed

With comment, densest condensation, hard

To mind and eye; but the long sleepless nights

Of my long life have made it easy to me.

And none can read the text, not even I;

And none can read the comment but myself;

And in the comment did I find the charm.

-          Tennyson, “Merlin and Vivien”, Idyls of the King

At last, the final instalment of my critique of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct – a book which appears to me as futile as the attempt by the Prescriptive Grammarians of the eighteenth century to impose the grammar and syntax of Virgil’s Latin on English (which only worked for Milton because he was a Genius and talent transcends all ideology). I say final because we are all getting bored with me bashing this piñata (as with combining bestiality, necrophilia and sadism, it’s flogging a dead horse, and I have no desire to hitch my bandwagon to it). The delay has largely been due to the unfortunate popularity of this truly woeful publication and me having to wait around on the reserve lists of two libraries in order to read and re-read the damn thing. As with the famous Bradbury short story “A Sound of Thunder”, these are the last pot-shots I’ll be taking at this particular T-Rex in the steaming Jurassic jungles – being careful not to tread on butterflies that might result in a future right-wing government where the humanities are dismantled from the school system, a subtle war is declared on the poor, people can take my DNA on a whim (oops, too late).

Anyway, before I tackle the final fallacy, to reiterate my position.

• No Darwinian genetic hardwiring is needed to explain the development of the arts.
• Humans and other primates are social organisms and their societies pass on successful and sometimes other non-fatal behaviours. This does not have to be linked to survival traits, and Dutton’s lack of distinction between social Darwinism (a largely discredited crock) and evolutionary Darwinism (one of the cornerstones of modern biology) is irksome.
• The assumption that culture exists evolves from some kind of a priori determinist behaviourism is deeply patronising and something familiar to us from the screeds of ideological bilge vomited out immediately prior to and during both Nazi Germany and the USSR, and in this case sutured unconvincingly onto science (again something both the Nazis and the Soviets were quite keen on).
• There is a sort of tacit quasi-Leavisite implication that if you disagree with Dutton’s position (supposedly backed by science, ergo: sanctioned by Nature) there must be something wrong – unnatural – with you (another Nazi argument for the volkisch).
• That ordinary individuals’ taste in art should be thus commented on, nay, directed, and limited to what is popular or what is beautiful by one individual’s definition (and therefore not intellectually challenging) is condescending and fatuous.

Verily, bollocks unto you, Denis. I suggest you read Umberto Eco’s delightful anthology On Ugliness, the companion book to his On Beauty. Confusingly at the Christchurch Public Library the former is shelved under philosophy and the latter under art, which makes one wonder how Dutton and Dewey were able to communicate across the centuries.

But back to The Final Fallacy: the cultural universality of art, which Dutton plugs in the chapter “‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art’”.

The following paragraph is audacious enough to take one’s breath away:

“The direction of opinion in anthropology for the last half century has been toward the denial of a human psychological nature other than what might have been constructed by local cultural conditions, along with a reluctance ever openly to discuss – or commit to print – comparisons between the values of peoples in modern industrial societies and those of inhabitants of tribal societies. Not knowing any better – how could they? – many art theorists and historians have bought this anthropological bill of goods and have repudiated the search for artistic universals, or at best remained silently agnostic on the subject. But the central features of art as a universal, cross-cultural phenomenon are not to be denied by bad ethnography. The similarities and analogies in the realm of the arts are in fact not difficult to see, and the anthropological literature leaves no doubt that all cultures have some form of art in perfectly intelligible Western senses of the term.”

Actually, that’s incorrect. The German ethnologists and anthropologists from Frobenius to the end of WWII, no doubt heavily influenced by the German Idealist philosophers, frequently had similar ideas about the universality of Kultur and the exclusivity of Zivilisation (the latter defining Western civilisations) – but they are rarely read much now, tainted by their usage by Nazism. “Similarities and analogies” are not the same as, well, the same thing, and to suggest “that all cultures have some form of art in perfectly intelligible Western senses of term” implies an artificial Western-centric construct by its very phraseology. Dutton then spends some time playing rhetorical and semantic games with various anthropologists writing on ‘primitive’ cultures, using their occasional poorly judged use of jargon to apparently support his argument, but not before saying:

“Is it possible to take seriously that the aesthetic interests of Europeans were ever limited to a special, tiny class of glorified objects (painting and sculpture, once seen only in palaces, today mostly surviving in fine arts museums), which were given rapt, disinterested attention only by a privileged elite?”

Well, yes, of course it is. Hence Leonardo da Vinci, who was a dab hand at interior design and stage sets (surviving as sketches) but mentions neither in the Paragonnes – a debate as to whether painting or sculpture is the most superior art form. One, I think, can draw a distinction between the higher ‘aesthetic’ mode and the merely ‘decorative’. The average peasant was probably too busy trying to survive to worry much about the cultural implications of the patterns they might make to decorate the hovel. A Tuscan peasant might see Giottos and Pieros at church, but that doesn’t mean he has the time or ability to whip one at home in between the drudgery of feudal life and dropping dead of the plague – though they might appreciate the respective innovations in naturalism and perspective. Dutton goes on:

“Most of us conceive of art and aesthetic experience as a broad category that encompasses the mass arts (popular forms such as Attic tragedy, Victorian novels, or tonight’s television offerings), historical expressions or political belief, the history of music and dance, and the immense variety of design traditions for furniture, practical implements, and architecture. Far from being a small, rarefied class of objects, in the European imagination back to the Greeks, art includes a staggeringly vast range of activities and creative products.”

True enough – of course you can put together such a category. But “most of us” – what ‘we’, paleface? You could also include within it graffiti, whittling and pissing your name in the snow, but I suspect it will be a category – call it added value, non-pragmatic creativity – that creaks at the seams. First “Attic tragedy, Victorian novels, or tonight’s television offerings” are more or less either middle class entertainment or propagandistic social conditioning. And even then just because the debatable “most of us conceive of art and aesthetic experience as a broad category that encompasses the mass arts”, doesn’t make it so. We have no idea from the surviving literature whether the average Greek saw theatre as primarily a religious or entertainment experience, or saw the heroes and satyrs on pots and dishes as any more aesthetically significant than modern day packaging or mass-produced decoration.

Unless Dutton suffered a freak electrical shock like Mel Gibson in What Women Want and can telepathically bridge the Wittgensteinian communication divide, he nor any of us are really in a position to say for sure anything of anyone’s cultural, or even individual response to creativity. Dutton snears at anthropologist Lynn M. Hart for using the term “producer” instead of “artist” and “visual image” instead of “art” when writing of the jyonti images made by women as part of wedding celebrations in Uttar Pradesh – but she is merely following the impartial practice of her discipline. German, for instance, preserves a distinction between the Bildnerei – the archaic ‘image makers’, and Kunstlerei – artists. Dutton writes:

“She studies a genre of folk art in one culture and, seeing that it is painting of a type, looks within Western culture to discover an analogue in painting. But if you want a comparison for a jyonti painting, it is absurd to look at a Mark Rothko hanging in a New York gallery. Jyonti paintings belong with domestic and dowry arts of cultures worldwide, from beautifully woven Maori feather cloaks for infants to embroidered samplers to knitted blankets in European folk traditions”.

To an extent, yes – but lest we forget, some of Rothko’s finest paintings were originally going to be wallpaper for the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, New York and undoubtedly, has this come to pass, have been seen by many of the restaurant’s patrons as no more significant than the fois gras they wolfed down. As for the cloaks and blankets, most people would be unlikely to see either outside of a museum and production of such things today outside of the tourist market is very rare, whereas jyonti paintings are very much a contemporary reality of life in Uttar Pradesh, as high art is in the West. And, of course, what might be considered kitsch in the West (as some might say of jyonti) might well be considered devotional or genuine sentiment elsewhere. That is like not making a distinction between Joyce or Proust and Mills and Boon, or being unable to perceive a distinction between Goddard and J J Abrams. Of course, things become more complex in trying to make such divisions between Curtius and Clive James, save for their choice of tone and medium.

The perceived failings of the anthropologists form the basis of Dutton’s argument and he asks of them “Are you confident you know enough about your own culture to make an incomparability claim?” The italics are his. What an arrogant, patronising thing to say (it is curious to say the least that none of the anthropologists criticised are men), especially when one might just as easily ask Dutton the same thing. Let’s look at some other italicised sentences:

“Could we imagine a set of aesthetic values in another culture – its aesthetic sensibility or aesthetic universe – that is unavailable to our aesthetic perception, no matter how hard we apply our mind to it?”

Various thought experiments involving imaginary primitive tribes ensues and I nod off to sleep, although frankly I thought that was the entire point of Dada, and the average person hearing Schoenberg would think it a communication from Mars. Much ‘I am cleverer than Arthur Danto’ ensues.

There – I am spent tormenting the man with the bowl cut. But one last peeve (and whereas some people have pet peeves, I have a pedigree hunting pack), regarding the notes to the book:

“These notes include references to material available on the Internet. Long Web site addresses are tricky to transcribe, and specific sites often go dead. Web citations are therefore given here in brackets: “w/s,” means “Web search,” and is followed by a series of words that can be typed into any standard search engine. The desired Web site, and other relevant sites, should appear in the top two or three entries in your search results. Thus [w/s sailer golf courses] is an instruction to type “sailer golf courses” into a search engine in order to locate Steve Sailer’s article relating golf-course design to prehistoric landscape tastes. An updated site for source material and discussion relevant to The Art Instinct can be found at www.theartinstinct.com”

CHRIST ON A BIKE! This from the man behind artsandlettersdaily.com. I know how to use the internet thanks, and this is unacceptable as academic citation. The full address should always be given along with the date the page was cited. If the link is dead, I can then consult the version cached on Google. Otherwise, I resent being forced to trawl through the other irrelevant bullshit out there in cyberspace.

This book makes me glad to be a public intellectual and not a tenured professor.