How Can Art Be Considered A Survival Trait?
April 16, 2015
https://youtu.be/PktUzdnBqWI
After watching Denis Dutton’s Ted talk on A Darwinian theory of Beauty, I began to consider how beauty is construed in my life. I never considered ideas of beauty as something that has been past through time and that what we as humans find beautiful come from our ancestors ideas of beauty. I then started to think about art and how I have studied painting and scupture from ancient greek art to the renaissance and to contemporary pieces and how I found them all so beautiful. Even though the artwork is not from my time or place there aesthetic elements to all the works that are beautiful to all humans.
I thought it was very interesting how Dutton use the ideal savanna landscpae as a way to prove how even though someone might not have seen it in real life, they will describe it as the perfect landscape in nature. It shows how there are certain images or shapes, like the teardrop, that humans find very attractive. Dutton explains this as deriving from the earliest of art and how there is something in our genetics as humans to see beautiful in those images or objects. I made me start to think about the how evolution works and that maybe we find certain things beautiful because they are needed to survive. Just as the peacock has a beautifully colorful tail to attract mates to continue reproducing, shapes could be more attractive to humans because they have a use needed for us to survive as well.
I like how Dutton ended with saying that beauty is not in the eye of the behold, but is actually “deep in our minds, handed down” to us through evolution.