Chapter 1 – Landscapes with water are the preferred paintings worldwide.
Chapter 2 – Art is part of human nature.
Chapter 3 – What is art? 12 characteristics of art:
1 Direct pleasure
2 Skill and virtuosity
3 Style
4 Novelty and creativity
5 Criticism
6 Representation
7 Special focus
8 Expressive individuality
9 Emotional saturation
10 Intellectual challenge
11 Art traditions and institutions
12 Imaginative experience
Chapter 4 – Even if other cultures have different art, it is still art. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk about differences, but we would just say it is not art.
Chapter 5 – Can art and evolution be combined?
95
“With the single exception of fictional narrative [...], Pinker argues that the arts are by-products of adaptations, rather than “adaptations in the biologist’s sense of the word,” meaning beneficial for survival and reproduction in the ancestral environment.”
Chapter 6 – Why does fiction/storytelling exist?
105
“Evolutionary researchers want to know why the mind is designed to find stories interesting.”
108
“Pretend play and fiction-making are isolable, evolved adaptations, forms of specialized intellectual machinery.”
114
“Fictional storytelling [...] is an enhancement and extension of counterfactual thinking into more possible worlds with more possibilities than life experience could ever offer up to an individual.”
115
“And it goes almost without saying that a major element of the appeal of modern cinema resides in its capacity to transport audiences to faraway places and to locations in the distant past of future. Especially if they are exotic for the viewer, the setting and background for a film can be vividly remembered long after the characters and plot are forgotten.” Not sure about the second part.
116
“The bard [...] is at once storyteller and also a tribal encyclopedist.”
118
“Stories are intrinsically about how the minds of real or fictional characters attempt to surmount problems, which means stories not only take their audiences into fictional settings but also take them into the inner lives of imaginary people.”
“Direct access to the inner mental experience of the story’s characters [...] is impossible to develop in other arts – music, dance, painting, and sculpture – to anything like the extent that it is available to oral or literary narrative.”
119
“Storytelling is a mirror of ordinary everyday social experience: of all the arts, it is the best suited to portray the mundane imaginative structures of memory, immediate perception, planning, calculation, and decision-making, both as we experience them ourselves and as we understand others to be experiencing them. But storytelling is also capable of taking us beyond the ordinary, and therein lies its mind-expanding capacity.”
121
“Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral.”
124
“The meaning of a literary work is not in the events it recounts. It is how events are interpreted that makes meaning. Interpretation, in turn, involves necessary reference to a point of view, which Carroll defines as “the locus of consciousness or experience within which any meaning takes place.”"
125
“The story is not just about an imaginary social life: rather, the author’s palpable presence means that stories are essentially communicative, and therefore social, events.”
126
“The general thesis about the deeper, long-term edification fiction can give us is not seriously challenged by new delivery mechanisms for storytelling. If there was adaptive survival value in ancient, Stone Age storytelling, it ought to extend to our own time and explain somehow the pleasure we get from any fictions – from effects-driven blockbuster movies, TV and cheap thrillers all the way to classic literature [...].”
127
“[...] across cultures, stories do seem to fall into recognizable patterns.”
132
“The basic themes and situations of fiction are a product of fundamental, evolved interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice, and overcoming adversity.”
“Story plots are not, therefore, unconscious archetypes but structures that inevitably follow, as Aristotle realized and Darwinian aesthetics can explain, from an instinctual desire to tell stories about the basic features of the human predicament.”
133f
“Aristotle argued that “spectacle” – the eye-popping effects of scenery, costumes, and stage machinery (the deus ex machina) that were already in use in the theatres of Greece – was despite its popularity the least important aspect of drama. The most important aspect was an arresting plot, which was the hardest thing for a dramatist to achieve – ahead even of interesting characters and the poetic use of language. In cinema today, it is still the story told that makes the greatest films.”
“Good stories compel our attention. So do good storytellers.”
Chapter 7 – Art is expensive because it shows somebody is so fit he can spare the money and therefore attract the opposite sex (sexual selection instead of natural selection)
147
Eloquence is the combination of: grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriatenesss, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, and originality.
149
“In the sense bequeathed to us by sexual selection’s effects on the evolution of speech, love is poetry’s natural subject.”
156
“The best way for an individual to demonstrate the possession of an adaptive quality – money, health, imagination, strength, vigor – is to be seen wasting these very resources.”
162
“Language puts mind on public display, where sexual choice could see them clearly for the first time in evolutionary history.”
Chapter 8 – art is always connected to a person because it is a presentation of skills and we value skills; art is connected to the artist’s intention, it always has to be seen with his world/time/environment in mind; we don’t value forgery because it cheats the obstacles the original artist had to overcome; Art institutions decide what Art is: ridiculous, Dada challenged this consciously just as any new art form does unconsciously
172f
“Three distinct functions for language in human social life.”
The communicative/descriptive function,
The imaginary function,
The fitness indicator function.
175
“History and culture give us the artistic forms (epics, novels, paintings, poems) in which we evaluate skill and virtuosity, but our admiration of skill and virtuosity itself is an adaptation derivedfrim sexual selection off the back of natural selection.”
178
“Goodman’s idea is that aesthetic perception, in becoming more informed by artistic knowledge over time, can sharpen and mature.”
182f
“Our job is to communicate the spiritual content of life as it is presented in the music. Nothing belongs to us; all you can do is pass it along.”
193
“Authenticity, which in the arts means at the most profound level communion with another soul, is something we are destined by evolution to want from literature, music, painting, and the other arts.”
Chapter 9 – aesthetic values are the way they are, but they could be different; they evolved to their present form (smell is not considered art but sound is, why? Evolution went this way)
204
“Human nature is permanent, [...] but human culture is created.”
206
“Art may seem largely cultural, but the art instinct that conditions it is not.”
Chapter 10 -
4 assertions:
The arts are not essentially social.
The arts are not just crafts.
The arts are not essentially religious or moral or political.
High-art traditions demand individuality.
226f
The difference between craft and art: craft knows the endresult, art doesn’t
228
An actress who tries to arouse a kind of emotional reaction in an audience, exercises craft. If she explores a character, she creates art. (soap and film?)
The beautiful is something that “pleases without a concept” and beautiful objects possess “purposiveness wihout purpose.” (Kant)
235
“The work of art is another human mind incarnate, not in flesh and blood but in sounds, words, or colors.”
“If you are an artist, the most enduring way to achieve a lasting artistic success is to create works of artistic pleasure that are saturated with emotion, specifically expressing distinct emotions that are perceived as yours.”
“Talking about art is an indirect way of talking about the inner lives of other people: that is, oddly, of artists.” Art criticism is “high-class gossip”.
241
“Kitsch shows you notihng genuinely new, changes nothing in your bright shining soul; to the contrary, it congratulates you for being exactly the refined person you already are.”
“High kitsch demands solemnity and high seriousness – entirely fake and parasitic. It succeeds not by expressing deep emotions but by reminding you of them.”
243
“Preoccupied as we are with tht flashy media and buzzing gizmos of daily experience, we forget how close we remain to the prehistoric women and men who first found beauty in the world. Their blood runs in our veins. Our art instinct is theirs.“
