O'Donnell, Michael. Review of Dennis Dutton's THE ART INSTINCT. BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW December 31, 2008.

Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, an elegant, slim, forcefully argued piece of scholarship, is in many ways the natural next step in a contrarian career. Dutton is an American expatriate living in New Zealand, where he teaches aesthetics and philosophy. He is infamous in many ports, not least for his hilarious Bad Writing Contest, which shamed humanities departments by spotlighting the most impenetrable, jargon-laden sentences in academic journals. But he is best known for founding the indispensable web site Arts & Letters Daily, which assembles news and magazine articles that meet a single criterion: making a good case. The pieces range widely, from analyzing George Bush's nostrils to puzzling over the dearth of Protestants living in Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Hours surrender to the site like tokens to a gumball machine. Dutton has excellent taste. And a good thing, too, because The Art Instinct is an exploration of human taste. The book's provocative thesis is that our propensity for creating music, literature, drama, and the visual arts is the product of Darwinian evolution, and that our taste in art arises not from cultural indicators but from universal, innate preferences. This argument doesn't come from out of nowhere -- Dutton openly builds upon and complements the work of linguist Steven Pinker, for one -- but the book advances it aggressively and persuasively, even if many questions remain. The Art Instinct also undercuts some fundamental premises in disciplines like cultural studies and anthropology. Expect some nasty reviews. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=20751503.