Darwin's Masterpiece

摘要

Does art evolve? Clearly the arts, specifically visual arts, undergo progressive changes. Skills develop-whether in the technicalrnsense, as with the progressive mastery of the oil medium in painting from the early Renaissance to the masterpieces of Titian, or in the more perceptually oriented achievements of naturalistic painting from Giotto to Constable.rnParticular works, such as the Mona Lisa or Auld Lang Syne, seem to have some built-in survival mechanism that renders them "fittest" to transcend cultural environments and stand the test of time. Are these cultural icons, or "memes" as Richard Dawkins calls them, somehow operating in an evolutionary manner?rnDenis Dutton thinks so. He believes that the "art instinct" -our natural tendency to create and appreciate art - is a genetic characteristic that endows its possessors with an adaptive advantage in a process of natural-cum-cultural selection. It is as if art-making abilities benefit from the same kind of sexually selective advantages that make sense of the male peacock's unwieldy tail.