wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

methinks we have rightly od'd ...overdarwined.

Longinus On The Sublime spoke of the universality of art and that was pre-Darwinian. But, there is also a personal reaction to art; an appreciation of the original, the unique, or the transcendent.

Komar & Melamid were very ill-used in this discussion; I'd encourage anyone who took away the notion they were conducting a semi-'scientific' project to look them up.

Klimt at least, was fairly poplular in his own time, I wouldn't doubt the other artists mentioned did not gain some sort of popular appreciation, or at least were not outright disliked the way abstract expressionists and Schoenberg are.

The vast majority of people have to force themselves through these works. The number of people who genuinely enjoy them continues to be a tiny minority, and how long can that go on with the excuse that this work is simply ahead of it's time?

It might help if modern museums would cull their collections of work as ridiculous as Cy Twombly's. If someone would care to defend "art" which could be mistaken for the marks a contractor would draw on walls which indicate they are to be knocked down, I'd love to hear it.

On the listener's comment that postmen will never be whistling Schoenberg on their routes... I doubt that people from the Peistocene would have been able to recognize the inherent beauty that most people today can find in much of the music of J.S. Bach. To say that avant classical or jazz is an evolutionary dead end is myopic. While there is always a "most popular" strategy, things evolve only through the trying out of a wide number of strategies to cope with the present moment. I suspect that human expression follows this model. Though abstract forms of art and music are not "the most popular strategy" I believe they are healthy and necessary to our own evolution which equates with survival. Vive la difference!

That segment was more fitting for the Leonard Lopate show. Just Saying.

I find it interesting that anyone who challenges the precepts of modernism is automatically labeled reactionary. I find the dogma of modernism incredibly rigid- it reminds me of the dogma of communism. If you don't agree you are shouted down. Might it be that yu are indoctrinated into your belief that Picasso is god. I can't help but feel that those who shout down non believers are pretty much like those who smugly supported the status quo of the French Academy in mid 19th century Paris, so sure of their sophisticated cosmopolitan ways and so dismissive of the unsophisticated borgeousie.

Friends -- Dance, the most fully tactile, bodily-engaged art and generally considered the mother of all the arts, was not mentioned in your segment (I hope it is in Mr. Dutton's book). The impulse to move in rhythmic patterns through time and space is a beautiful experience, and it would seem, innate not only in humans. To our species' genetic drive, add awareness, reflection and the couple art/awe. And of course, we change (yay Schoenberg). But none of this is new (whew).

I just caught the tail end of your conversation-I wish I had heard the whole thing- it sounds fascinating. I am a landscape painter who spends my summers on a small island in Maine. The island is veryremote and untouched by modern influences.I see over and over again that the island has an incredible impact on people who coe there. They seem to get in touch with some intuitive DNA pulled up from our long past selves. Kids shed all the trappings of modern life and fall into a rythm with the environment that is probably exactly what it was like for kids two hundred years ago. There are these basic urges and desires that we modern people have pushed out of our psyches. Given the chance they well up again. I have often used the same analogy regarding Hirst's shark- it seems like one of those Victorian curiosites. Kind of like the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. ANd I would argue that contemporary art resides in the head and not the heart. It is all cleverness and concept. ANd it offers no alternative to our modern lives which are filled with thoughts not feelings. And regarding Lisa from Brroklyn's comment about Komar and Melamid- it was obviously meant as a satirical exercise so it in no way diminishes the author's premise.

I have no problem accepting that evolution affects our appreciation of art. After all, it seems obvious that our senses, and the way our brains handle their input, transforming it into something that affects our minds, are at least partially the result of evolution.

But I resist any deterministic view of art appreciation on the gut level. How dare anyone, especially an aesthetician, make silly generalizations like: "avant-garde classical or jazz musicians will never be popular." Art appreciation my be limited by the state of the evolution of our sensory and other organs, but that does not mean we cannot respond to whatever we perceive as art. And it cannot mean that we cannot learn to appreciate different kinds of art, even if it takes learning how to rethink what we are and what art is.

After all, what would art be if it were not capable of truly transforming the way we view both our world and ourselves?

In regards to the idea that "avant-garde" art can never be truly popular: painters such as Picasso, Klimt and composers like Debussy and Ravel, to name a very small few, were considered wildly avant garde and not initially embraced. Now they're beloved canonical artists. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was so scandalously bizarre to audiences of its time that people rioted, and yet today it is an extremely popular concert work. And I disagree that abstract expressionists are not popular.
Human nature goes beyond survival to imagination and intellectual inquiry. And after artistic innovation cultural norms adapt.

I believe that avant garde art, like the fringes of other human expression, test the limits of our observable world, just as our early ancestors tested the limits of theirs through exploration and innovation. I imagine the person who discovered that clams and blueberries were edible might have been considered “avant garde” for their day. Such exploration tests and finds new best ways for humans to “be”; thus evolving the species. Some avant garde works (like DaVinci’s work, in his day) becomes vital to society. Some simply doesn’t.

The reference to evolutionary biology is interesting, and certainly evolution has something to say about art. Unfortunate, then, that Dutton has reached such a reactionary conclusion. His idea that modernism is somehow contrary to an idealized conception of 'human nature' (whatever that is), and therefore irrelevant, is simply a tired view of aesthetics wrapped in a new language.

Biology shouldn't be used as a means of avoiding difficult questions about art's function in human society.

For a more relevant application of the lessons of biology to art see Niklas Luhmann's Art as a Social System

So, what does it say, evolutionarily speaking, about those of us who take genuine pleasure in Godard and various other artists/producers considered within the avant garde? Are we somehow alien or, perhaps, rebelling against some essential human nature?

It's a little speculative to apply Darwin's theories to the psychology behind art since we cannot definitively study the psychology of our ancestors.

That segment was more fitting for the Leonard Lopate show. Just Saying.

Totally reductive---humanists who want to be scientists

The paintings that came out of Komar and Melamid's project were pastiches - and laughably bad. They were much more than a simple survey of universal tastes. They were a critique of the idea of "art by committee" and an illustration of the lowest common denominator.

I think this is the reason certain artists like Jean-Luc Godard, the abstract expressionist painters, and the composers of avant-garde classical and jazz music will never, ever be truly popular.

They're not ahead of the curve, they're contradicting human nature.

Fascinating segment. Thanks.

this guy should read santayana. these ideas are not so new...