ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
and geographically-specific variables that were instrumental to his ascendancy. The
same goes for specific artists, artworks, and movements. Another thing we can do is
make sure to carve adaptation at the joints – to pinpoint the locus of adaptation before
we leap to the generation of hypotheses. With respect to art behavior, there is no evidence that art objects constitute a natural category that is distinct from artifacts. We
cannot point to a set of objective criteria that can be used to determine whether a given object or performance is “art.” Thus, whether or not an object or performance is
“art” is an opinion, not a fact. This is a powerful indicator that we have been looking
for adaptation in the wrong place. Symbolic behavior may point the way to a more
promising path of inquiry.
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José Angel García Landa
University of Zaragoza, Spain
Lock’s paper is highly cogent, informative and well argued, and I have found much to
learn from it. Let me also make clear that I strongly dislike, with whatever strength
indifference can muster, the modernist-primitivist art represented by his example of
choice, Colin McCahon. But the paper does an excellent job in arguing a number of
cultural, cognitive and evolutionary reasons why McCahon’s work might be successful. It is not so effective, in my view, when it comes to conveying why it has actually
been successful in the struggle for life of the art world ecosystem. By way of critique,
the paper is too deliberately restricted to one context of response, evolutionary aesthetics, and to that extent it is an exercise in keeping out other approaches. It does that
so smoothly that one does not even notice it has been done. But the paper lacks
(much) discussion of the cultural context of art in New Zealand, of artistic traditions
in twentieth-century painting, of the dynamics of the art world and the art profession.
Are these matters irrelevant? (Well, perhaps they are within the scope of Lock’s notion of evolutionary aesthetics). But what has created the bandwagon effect? It is arguable that once the discourse of New Zealandism is active, any New Zealand artist
hailed as a New Zealander might have been able to occupy the slot and have the discourse stick to him and characterize him. I take the technical incompetence of
McCahon’s, and the lack of a militant focus on New Zealand in his work as proof that
any other artist might have filled the bill equally well – or better, indeed, in the case of
more explicitly regional painters. But the vortex of attention selected McCahon, Rita
Angus, and a handful of others. Lock devotes some attention to the role of critics in
selecting artists (quite arbitrarily, it w