The appre­ci­a­tion of art is not cul­tur­ally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dut­ton as elab­o­rated in his lat­est book, The Art Instinct. In a gen­er­ally pos­i­tive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many lim­i­ta­tions of Dutton’s con­jec­ture as well as sum­ma­riz­ing it’s main points:

Draw­ing on Charles Darwin’s sec­ond great book, The Descent of Man, and Selec­tion in Rela­tion to Sex, Dut­ton argues that art, like broad shoul­ders in a man and a nar­row waist in a woman, facil­i­tates seduc­tion. We tell sto­ries, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pic­tures in order to find a mate and, hav­ing found one, pro­duce chil­dren. We value art because, Dut­ton claims, it may be made of rare and valu­able mate­ri­als and require much skill to pro­duce. Peo­ple value wealth and skill in choos­ing a mate. We can add to Dutton’s argu­ment the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pic­tures of women who had been rated by adults as either attrac­tive or unat­trac­tive, the babies looked much longer at the attrac­tive ones.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily