ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
to see the dominance of pure arbitrariness in the bandwagon effect. Success in modern
art (and we wouldn’t be discussing McCahon otherwise) is the result of a chaotic matrix of circumstances, and that argues somewhat against the fitness dimension in
Lock’s argument.
A theory such as Lock’s selects some elements from a tangled web of complexity in
order to foreground them or to show the way they are active. Still the clarity of the
theory plays against itself insofar as there are many elements left outside the complex
which are just as entwined with it as those which are brought to the light by the theory. The theory then creates a kind of hindsight bias effect regarding its views of those
artists who are eventually consecrated.
Perhaps I’m just saying that Lock explains the success of some elements which are
present in art in general, as a scientific theory should, but does not really account for
the preeminence of specific artists, because this preeminence is not to be fully explained at this level of reasoning. One would have to engage in a more detailed way
dominant discourses and counter discourses in the 20th century, postcolonial dynamics of representation, and the whole shebang of historical, biographic, culturalaesthetic and poststructuralist criticism, which would make the paper less distinctive
as an intervention in evolutionary aesthetics. There would be downsides, and upsides.
As it is, the paper is an interesting specimen of Third Culture (i.e. cultural theory written under the aegis of sociobiology and cognitivism). To its credit, it does make some
moves in the direction of what I would like to call Fourth Culture – integrating within
an evolutionary perspective the insights of cultural criticism, historical scholarship,
aesthetics...instead of dismissing them and restricting the scope to what can be seen
from a neo-Paleolithic viewpoint.
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Mariagrazia Portera
University of Florence (Italy), Department of Philosophy
Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka (Croatia)
“First steps towards a true interdisciplinary evolutionary aesthetics”
Evolutionary Aesthetics (EA) is a bourgeoning, youthful field of study, the main aim
of which is, broadly speaking, the “importation of aesthetics into natural sciences, and
especially its integration into the heuristic of Darwin’s evolutionary theory” (Voland,
Grammer 2003: 5). EA provides today a set of three main accounts for the emergence
of an aesthetic attitude in humans: an account relying on natural selection (adaptationist account), an account based on sexual selection (understood in a Darwinian sense;
Miller 2000), an account relying on the concept of spandrel (Pinker 1997). Anthony
Lock’s paper is in line with the adaptationist account.
I agree with Lock’s view that “evolutionary aesthetics is most exciting when adaptation allows for new ideas and powerful insight into artistic problems”. However, I
would like to briefly highlight some perplexities concerning his application of Dutton’s and Dissanayake’s theory of the interpersonal relationships (for the emergences
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