ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
COMMENTARIES
Ellen Dissanayake
Affiliate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle
“Aesthetic Devices Promote Viewers’ Felt Emotional Connections with Artists”
In his essay, Anthony Lock uses several disparate theoretical ideas from “evolutionary aesthetics” (a wide-ranging and not-always-coherent field) to enhance the
relevance of a twentieth-century art-historical concept like “New Zealandism.”
Among these ideas, he emphasizes hypotheses about the development in early
Homo species of “interpersonal relationships” as early as 1.4 to 1.7 million years
ago in order to explain the sometimes “deep, personal and unique connection”
sometimes felt by a viewer of a painting with the person who painted it. He bases
his ideas primarily on the work of two authors, Denis Dutton and myself.
Although I commend studies in the humanities that are aware of evolutionary ideas,
and believe that the humanities can benefit from knowledge of human behavioral evolution, it is difficult for me to fully endorse the application of my ideas to the conclusions described in the essay. My hypothesis is much more complex than presented by
Lock and, as presented, I do not find that it supports the conclusions that are drawn
from it. In this commentary, I will not discuss the particular use made of Denis Dutton’s ideas, which in any case vary considerably from mine (Dissanayake 2014).
My hypothesis about the evolution of intimate mother-infant interaction begins with
two earlier anatomical adaptations that characterize species of our genus, Homo –
namely, bipdedality and a gradually enlarging brain. These characteristic traits required numerous other adaptive changes in physical characteristics, one of which was
a reshaped pelvis that became narrower and shorter than birth canals of quadrupedal
primates, thereby necessitating a reduced gestation period so that a large-headed infant could be successfully