The Art Instinct

What Hacker News says

1. the_duckMar 2015
   To me, computer generated art always feels less remarkable than traditional art. If you present me with two paintings that are identical, pixel for pixel, and tell me that one is human authored and the other computer authored, I'd be less interested in the computer authored one. I'd spend less time thinking about it.

   I always found this fact fascinating. Why would I attribute different levels of worth to two artifacts that were totally identical, save for their method of construction?

   I didn't have a good answer to this until I read a book by aesthetician Dennis Dutton (The Art Instinct). Dutton presents a 12 factor model of art, and claims that artifacts exhibiting all 12 criteria tend to be unambiguously judged as "valid art", while artifacts that miss some but exhibit most are considered "edge cases", things that reasonable people can dispute the artistic validity of.

   One of Dutton's 12 criteria is "expressive individuality". Most art objects are the products of a single person's imagination. Computer generated art tends to lack this trait, and this, I think, is why it feels less valid than human-made art.

   Here's an outline of the 12-factor model: http://www.aristos.org/aris-10/dutton.htm

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2. rikrootsAug 2022
   I have a lot of sympathy with this article's main point of view, that art has has its roots in the biological evolution of the human species. The author references a book by Denis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution[1] - where Dutton argues that art is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. That book was published in 2010; I wrote a (short) article in 2007 along very similar lines in an attempt to explain why poetry exists in every human language[2] - it's good to find out that I'm not alone in having such an outrageous belief!

   The second half of the article, on how computer-generated art fits into the art-is-fundamentally-social equation ... I currently have no definitive opinion on that question. My thoughts on the issue vary on a day-to-day basis between "art without a human creator is irrelevant" and "art happens in the mind of the person who sees/hears/feels it, not in the medium used to present and preserve it". My guts favour the latter opinion, but it would be nice if I could work out a decent argument to support the assertion.

   [1] - the link in the article to the book is broken. The book is available from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Instinct-Beauty-Pleasure-Evolut...

   [2] - The Monkeys Who Learned To Sing - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/monkeys-learn-to-sin...

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3. bjornsingSep 2019
   > At the same time, very young children “can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories,” distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct.

   One of my favorite quotes comes to mind:

   “Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” — Euripides

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4. keiferskiSep 2019
   This article is ultimately a bit philosophically underwhelming because it doesn't delve deeper into the notions of "fact" and "fiction" and how (according to many philosophers, at least) they are ultimately messy linguistic concepts. There are many things considered facts which are really little more than fictions which have been accepted society-wide. Indeed the existence of a coherent continuing society seems almost dependent on a shared semi-fictional narrative. Jorge Luis Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a fantastic short story on this idea. [1]

   Very young children “can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories,” distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. “Not only does the artistic structure of stories speak to Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity.”

   An alternative view would be that children haven't been indoctrinated, for lack of a better word, into the socio-linguistic world of adults, which has privileged some fictions and relegated others.

   1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius, http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf

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5. chewxyApr 2014
   I gave a talk just a couple of days ago on the beauty of Python code[0] - the talk hasn't been transcripted yet. In it I gave an example of how we've been conditioned by evolution to see clever things as beautiful[1][2].

   I gave this scenario in the talk: imagine you were a paleolithic craftsman making handaxes. Now, you have a competitor making them handaxes too. We'll assume you make a better hand axe - sharper, cleaner lines and more wedge-shaped than the competitors. This leads to a higher "usefulness" than your competitor's handaxe.

   You consistently make better handaxes than your competitor. You get better mates than your competitor. You have a higher probability of spreading your genes. Your "good" handaxes has become a proxy signal for your skill in making handaxes, which itself is a signal of your intelligence.

   Over time, if the population uses only the "goodness" of the handaxe as a deciding factor in deciding mating partners, the population needs to be able to discern "good" handaxes from "bad" handaxes. As the lines get smoother, we become more and more tuned towards this standard of "beauty", and we put more and more reverence towards the makers of such items of beauty.

   In short, humans see math as beautiful because it is a signa for intelligence, which is a deciding factor of fitness in our evolution. Indeed, our evolution seem to value intelligence over strength anyway.

   Now, all the above is personal deduction of course. But I believe if we do go on and figure out the evolution of the medial orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, we'd see it's tied to intelligence.

   [0]: https://speakerdeck.com/chewxy/beautiful-python - not very useful slides without the talk. The 4 criteria can also be translated to: usefulness, simplicity, averageness (I used the example: if the man on the street can read your python code and understand it, you did a good job), cleverness

   [1]: The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton

   [2]: http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_...

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6. darntonMar 2011
   Ideas similar to this are explored by Denis Dutton in The Art Instinct (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Instinct-Beauty-Pleasure-Evolution...).

   The basic idea, in one sentence, is that our preferences in art are a result of our ancestral environment.

   He cover various ways in which both natural and sexual selection pressures have shaped how we appreciate various artistic products and how we create them. He explores aesthetics from Aristotle to post-modernism and looks, from the Darwinian perspective he's formulated, why we regard forgeries and modern art "readymades" the way we do.

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