Animating beauty

University of Canterbury philosophy lecturer Denis Dutton has collaborated with TEDTalks and animator Andrew Park creating a video illustrating the provocative argument about beauty — that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply “in the eye of the beholder,” are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins. Dutton is founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily, a three-column compendium of culture news from all over the web, author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, and is on the advisory board of Cybereditions, a publisher specialising in ebooks and print-on-demand editions of nonfiction works. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. The first TED Women happens in Washington DC this week.