The Art Instinct
By Peter LloydDo humans have an art instinct? Well, you're asking the wrong person if you want an objective look at both sides of this question. Having written about creativity and innovation for so many years, I rolled my eyes and sighed, "Oh, really?" when I read, "'Art Instinct' theorizes we may be hard-wired by nature to create."
The story in Silicon Valley's MercuryNews.com introduced me to Denis Dutton and his book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.Dutton, the curator of Arts & Letters Daily, takes the nature side of the nurture vs. nature debate and apparently goes a lot further than what the headline premise suggests.
Yes, we are wired for creativity, I think Dutton would say, but he contends that much of what we've hammered out as philosophy is little more than human intuition. When it comes to art, well that's something like intuition about what's beautiful and what's not. In this year of Darwin celebrations—Charles' 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species—folks are paying a lot of attention to the greatest scientist of all time.
But it's really old news that Darwin's Natural Selection drives, well, just about everything, including creativity in all its manifestations. Art represents just one example of the adaptation that makes us human.
If we follow this art instinct, we will never be out of work. Dutton reminds us that we haven't begun to exhaust our artistic potential when he points out that we haven't begun to tap an entire realm of art. We have all the visual arts for our eyes and music to please our ears, but no art addresses itself to our noses.
But then, I've always considered the culinary arts as the only one we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, swallow, and become.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.