I’m confused. Denis Dutton in Edge Magazine:
This experience taught me something crucially important: that New Guinea standards for greatness and for excellence are as far as I could determine the same as those of knowledgeable European curators, connoisseurs, and collectors… the people who really know the good work in museums, who are very deeply familiar with New Guinea art but who have never set foot in New Guinea, oddly have the same taste patterns as New Guinea carvers themselves. And this shows that with the art form, knowledge and familiarity with the whole field determines a convergence of taste. And that, again, has to be explained.
Dutton sees evolution’s hand at work in the development of human artistic capability. Well, maybe; but that seems to be overlooking a far simpler explanation.
Let’s assume the following factors are in play:
- Historically Guinean art would have been expropriated without sale on the basis of what appeared to be most valuable rather than most beautiful;
- Currently Guinean carvers sell their work, normally getting the highest prices from foreign collectors, and normally reserving their best work for those collectors.
These two assumptions appear relatively non-controversial. The first factor means that expert outsiders who have never been to Guinea will tend to have seen the “best” (most valuable) works, and so their taste will have been shaped by it. The second factor means that carvers now have a strong incentive to match their work to the tastes of expert outsiders who in large part determine the market for their carvings. If the two groups are in an economic relationship that has caused the tastes of both sides to converge around a certain set of aesthetics, it would explain why their tastes are so similar – while the tastes of the average joe are not:
I’m not saying that the New Guineans would make judgments that would coincide with every naive tourist — newcomers to the art — who gets off the boat. Tourists in my experience make very bad choices in buying New Guinea arts.
This example doesn’t present much, if any, evidence for a theory of evolved aesthetics, but it does serve as an excellent example of how our culture is shaped silently by our economic relationships. I’d be more interested to see a thesis that examines the influence that art might have played in economic terms rather than evolutionary terms, but I should also declare a vested interest, in that I’d rather make some money from my own writing…
Tags: Denis Dutton, Evolution, New Guinean carving