The Savannah Hypothesis

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Arcadia 1830 Károly Markó

In his 2009 book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, Denis Dutton argues that human tastes in the arts are evolutionary traits, shaped by natural selection. His thoroughly-researched, thoughtful and well-reasoned arguments seem to overturn a century of art criticism and academic theory, which has often postulated that those tastes are determined solely by the surrounding culture.

“Our love of beauty is inborn, and many artistic tastes are universal across cultures - such as the preference for landscapes that feature water and distant trees, like the savannah where we first evolved.”

While Mr. Dutton examines all the arts, not just painting or landscape painting in particular, it is the concept of a universally admired landscape that we find most interesting. One of the statistical bases for the notion of a universal landscape came from a 1993 study by Soviet artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Me…