Week One: Evolutionary Art

After reading Richard Conniff's article "The Natural History of Art" I found myself considering art in a way I never had before. It's true that the things in this world I find most beautiful are natural landscape settings. However, I prefer mountainous scenes, preferably mountains I've climbed, to calm, secure, habitable settings that Conniff describes as evolutionarily safe and therefore desirable for humans to view as art.

I started thinking that if I were to accept this theory about the history of art, I would like to believe that we have evolved since our ancestors lived in the African savannah and preferred open lands and water sources in view from their habitats. Maybe this is me supporting Conniff's assertion that his claim is "an affront to our idea of what it means to be human" (96), but I would imagine that if our technology, social and language skills, and lifestyles have evolved over a few thousand years, maybe our art tastes have evolved too. If humans truly only appreciated art because our DNA is coded to determine what we find beautiful, then movements like cubism should have died off quickly, because those paintings definitely do not depict a habitable African landscape.

I found the section about natural fears in humans very interesting, that we fear snakes or spiders much more than guns or electrical wires simply because of our evolutionary instincts, even though we know that the latter two are more dangerous in our everyday lives. But I'm still not convinced that this is evidence for the art-encoded-in-DNA argument.

One of the main issues I had with this article, beyond my own skepticism, was the way Conniff tried to argue that the reason humans love art or situations we see that scare us, such as Shark Week on Discovery channel, horror movies, or even other people’s car wrecks, is because of our evolutionary desire to prepare against danger. If we watch Shark Week, we know what we should do in the highly unlikely event of a shark attack: kick it in the face (I think…). However, I cannot see an evolutionary equivalent to this: did humans go seek out dangerous situations on the African savannah in order to prepare themselves, after spending all that time and effort finding a safe, beautiful place with water and a view? I highly doubt that humans would have gone to watch lions feed or stampedes occur just so they would be prepared, just in case. I feel like this portion of Conniff’s argument was contradictory to his earlier argumentative points, which at least made sense to me, and thus negated all of the positive strides he had made in convincing me that we find art beautiful because of our evolutionary instincts.