Is it or isn’t it

29 January 2009 – University of Canterbury professor of philosophy Denis Dutton’s latest book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution – which supposes that art appreciation stems first from evolutionary adaptions made during the Pleistocene – is reviewed in The New York Times by fellow author Anthony Gottlieb. “Some psychologists look to the Pleistocene epoch [for the origins of art], which began about 1.6 million years ago, when – in the course of some 80,000 generations of surviving and mating – our ancestors may have evolved the instincts that led eventually to the works of Bach, Rembrandt and Proust. ‘Darwinian aesthetics’ is what Denis Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct, calls this idea, and he thinks its time has come.” In the early 1990s Dutton founded the lobby group The New Zealand Friends of Public Broadcasting in response to proposals to devolve New Zealand’s two non-commercial public radio stations.