Category Archives: aesthetics

Serendipitous Ads and artist Tara Giannini

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Good advertising brings your attention to things you want to know. One day I looked up at the top of my blog, and saw an ‘ad’ I immediately liked. It was a detail of the work above. You see, I belong to Culture Pundits, a network of art blogs and artists who display ads related to the arts (and for some reason Tekserve). Serendipity! I can’t think of the last time an ad showed me anything of interest, much less introduced me to a new artist.

Idiotically, I did not click on the ad. So I had to do some sleuthing to find artist Tara Giannini‘s website and more of her intricate, layered panels. I can’t decide if they would fit better in a Regency mansion or creepy junkshop. Apparently, the artist had something similar in mind, stating that she tries to find the line between ugliness and beauty.

Based in Brooklyn, Giannini describes her work as exploring “the implications, limitations and individual perceptions of taste, beauty and excess in both art and culture, while simultaneously exploring my interests in overindulgence, visual complexity and ornamentation. It is a romantic and celebratory exploration into personal ideals of the beautiful, and the play that exists between the natural and the artificial.”
I love the thickness of the paint and lushness of the materials. While these works don’t quite have that creepy air of Victorian dolls, Giannini takes the same neo-Baroque, over the top aesthetic and pushes it until it’s on the cusp of breaking down. It’s interesting and sensual in an unpleasant way.

This kind of detailed, 3D works is better appreciated in person, especially for grasping scale, but sometimes you just know you like something, right?

Gorilla Aesthetics

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There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.–Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species

I have a gripe against Darwinism. Why did my species evolve to create buildings on cold, snowy islands like Manhattan without developing super thick skin? Or better yet, why does my species not live only on tropical islands? Yet another snow storm in progress here at Art Ravel’s shivering office. (It’s so cold the office itself is shivering.)

Darwin is everywhere. More and more books keep coming up on him. My ears now prick up at the name, since I attended a book tour lecture that links current aesthetics with our evolutionary past. (That book, too, got a mention in the New York Times.) Yet Darwinism and evolution isn’t the prickly subject it once was. Why the spout of interest?

Perhaps it’s because his 200th birthday is coming up. It may be that radical thinker Charles Darwin himself was a fascinating man, no doubt party true. However, it is also the case that biographers feel that they need to argue either that racism is inherent to Darwin’s theories or, on the contrary, that he was an abolitionist and his theories show a common origin for all mankind.

If people are still arguing about him and theories are still sprouting from his ideas, perhaps Darwin’s worth the glut of pages. I have it on good authority that The Origin of the Species is fascinating reading. Im not actually going to read it, but I thought I might put up some lovely gorilla art in Darwin’s honor. Unfortunately, there is no lovely gorilla art. (See above.)

Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct, Darwinism and a Question

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The following piece on Denis Dutton’s new book The Art Instinct, originally published yesterday in Blogcritics Magazine, is a case of ‘ask and ye shall receive.’ I wrote the review of a book lecture around a question: does a Darwinistic basis for art mean we can judge art’s merits by its popularity? Then the author answered my question!

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The heady realms of aesthetic theory floated during a recent Friday afternoon when I attended a lecture at NYU’s School of Philosophy. It was not so heady as it might have been given that lecturer, Denis Dutton, rebels against the jargon of much aesthetic criticism. He was promoting his new book, The Art Instinct, which argues for a Darwinian basis to art and aesthetic tastes in man.

Note that this Darwinism contradicts the common assumption of art as a cultural construct. It also implies that art has helped humans survive in some way. Yet nobody knew how, including Dutton, for certainly art seems to be a useless, weird, and inexplicable impulse.

Dutton, inspired by how “weird” our aesthetic tastes are, investigated the human reason for creating and valuing art. He believes that strong roots in Darwinism complement our understanding of why art is important and what, in fact, art is. It’s a contentious argument for an ambitious book. Dutton starts by defining art.

For all the audacity, Dutton made some interesting points. For instance, why is it that humans have developed from their sense of hearing the tonal music of Beethoven that so delights us instead of using their sense of smell to create nose symphonies? Smell is just as useful as hearing. Yet very few people pick out the notes of a perfume the way they do out of a symphony, nor are perfumes created out of a structured set of notes.

Dutton also commented that humans, unlike other animals, constantly seek out imaginative representations of reality rather than true, real things. That is, they seek out lies rather than truth. Think of all the time that is spent watching TV shows, reading stories, or looking at pictures. How have lies proven a more useful trait, in an evolutionary sense? By extension, how has art?

A different question bothers me, and I wished I had asked Dutton for his opinion. His theory considers art a natural need and that we are uniquely configured as a species to appreciate it. A Darwinian basis for art suggests a set of universal aesthetics that people everywhere use to appreciate and judge art. If aesthetics are universal, are artworks that appeal to the most number of people better?

I don’t know if Dutton would agree. In fact I doubt it, despite the fact that he ridiculed the academics who congratulate themselves on being sophisticates for understanding modern and contemporary art in comparison to a “bourgeois” majority.

One could argue that Darwinism provides a biological basis for elitism. In fact, Dutton’s theories are more useful for enticing one to form arguments than they are at answering questions. Often enough I’m satisfied with discussions with no answers, yet this particular question fascinates me. While I’m no philosopher, my art instinct suggests that popular art equals better art.
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Dutton’s response to the original article here (scroll to the bottom of the page).