Objective:
- Consider the origins of art
- Explore a brief history of Western Art
- Examine multiple perspectives for evaluating art
Post:
Video: 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 landspace 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.
Reflection:
Although I have study the beginnings of the first known art, my professors have alway started with the cave paintings at Lascaux. I never thought about what led up to that moment and why humans would start to create artwork. When I think about the earliest time I assume that the humans were only ever trying to survive day to day and so the idea of taking the time to create art must have a greater purpose that can be hard to understand. I think that it comes from within us and the idea of trying to express ourselves in a way that can be understod by all no matter what languages they speak or where they come from. I think this relates to what Dutton was saying in the video because in the earliest time there was no language to relay on so humans found other ways to communicate.
I think that porducing art is more than just for communication but the basis of survival. It may not be in the same way it use to be in the earliest time, like trying to find a mate, but today artist need to produce art because it is something that they are willed to do. They must create their artwork because it is apart of their being.
Future Goal:
I hope to use this idea of beautiful as something that is imbedded in us as humans and start to see patterns in the artworks that I study. I hope that it will help me understand why artist depict things in a certain way and that other might do that same because of this idea of a beauty that is universal to us.
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