Comments on: Prospect and refuge

By: Dave Bell

Dave Bell — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:02:41 +0000

It’s an interesting thought that the far distant ancestral landscape of the savannah is what has predisposed us to see some landscapes as beautiful nd desirable. I’m not sure that it’s a large-scale factor, but there’s certainly something tempting in the thought of having a mix of cover and killing ground.
As for art, my own feeling is that its widespread appeal depends on how much out-of-channel knowledge is needed. Classic, essentially pictorial, art, has a lot of the information in the picture. You don’t need to know the classical allusions or the symbols to get something out of it. You don’t need to do a da Vinci Code on The Last Supper, although it helps to know the story.
The more a piece of art needs to be explained, the less memorable it is. Piccasso’s Guernica needs less explanation than his other paintings in that style. Mondrian produced something that feels more like design than like art.
And now, with the camera and with cheap printing, anyone can have a picture of a place or person on the wall. Art has always chased after the people with money, and they want something that emphasises that they are different. I can’t help thinking that there are swathes of modern art that are akin to a con game, but if people are getting what they want why shouldn’t the providers get paid.
And that sort of takes us back to the landscape. There’s so much of even the “wild” landscape in the UK which is the product of man. Uplands grazed by sheep, heather moorland managed by rotational burning, almost none of the beauty is the product of uncontrolled nature. And the work was paid for by the profits of farming, and by such things as the desires of the rich to indulge in now-unfashionable country sports: fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, and the like.
Cheap food and “animal rights”, laudable though they often can be, puts a pressure on the countryside which conflicts with the desires for what the countryside should look like. And often the same vociferous campaigners want all the opposing objectives.
At least the people buying dead sharks in formaldehyde are willing to pay for what they want.

By: Robert Rossney

Robert Rossney — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:29:40 +0000

I think the book you should be looking here is not Steven Pinker’s *How the Mind Works*, but E.O. Wilson’s much earlier *Sociobiology* (1975).
Wilson’s little essay (it’s at the end) about the sociobiological roots of our preferences for landscapes of low hills overlooking water is considerably more detailed than Pinker’s. (I think Pinker’s version is so brief because Wilson’s has become common currency.)
Wilson’s essay also contains (as Pinker’s does not) the proviso that we really don’t know any of this. Indeed, he closes by suggesting that we should generally avoid attributing the complexities of culture to the simple imperatives of sociobiology.
Of course, Wilson inevitably succumbed to the attractiveness of the idea (see his *On Human Nature*). But his warning remains useful.

By: Dean Esmay

Dean Esmay — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:56:57 +0000

I think that if you look hard through anthropological and archaeological references, you’ll find very, very little evidence that any large group of humans ever habitually lived in caves. The term “cave man” is an almost complete misnomer.
What of cave paintings? They appear to have been more like cathedrals people went to visit, i.e. not places they lived.
Mostly, caves are very dangerous, not to mention uncomfortable. Far easier to build wooden houses.
Houses are not much like caves. At least I don’t know of many caves with multiple entrances and windows and such.
It’s not that humans never, ever lived in caves, but it was never common. Dank, breezy, full of dangerous predators or just annoying animals (like bats and their guano), and all sorts of places where your kids might wander off and disappear–forever.
Nice to see someone noticing that what people think of as “nature” is, however, quite often very cultivated and pruned, that even stuff that looks “untouched” is usually quite a bit manipulated–and that what is truly “pristine” and “untouched by human hands” is often quite snarly, ugly, and dangerous.

By: Faren Miller

Faren Miller — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:31:30 +0000

To the Sublime and the Beautiful, add another category they used back then: the Picturesque. And the very idea of landscape as something desirable (in art or the viewing of nature) may not have fully developed until travel was no longer such a slog. [Someone can probably contradict me and find Roman poets rhapsodizing over mountain peaks, but my knowledge of lit. doesn't go back that far.]
I’m a “landscape junkie” — and a big Friedrich fan — with lots of books on landscape painting, and I prefer a certain amount of Sublimity to more manicured scenes. Does that come from a semi-coddled middle-class background? I don’t really want to set off a raging *political* debate, since the anthro and aesthetics discussed above are plenty interesting, but the viewer’s circumstances are bound to have a huge impact on perception.
PS: I’m far from rich these days, but I have a great view of distant plains, more distant mountains, and Arizona’s Rim from the window by this computer, so I consider myself lucky!

By: P J Evans

P J Evans — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:20:33 +0000

‘Have any of you actually seen the African savanna? Sure the animals look nice (from a safe distance or from a helicopter) but the countryside itself looks “stark and severe”, ie nice to see in photos but you wouldn’t want to live there.’
I live in California. It’s the kind of landscape I grew up with. (On visiting the UK, I found the border country to be deceptively familiar: it looks like home to me.) There’s a lot of stuff there, if you know how to see it, but if you come from someplace with high rainfall, you’d see a barren land where I see beauty.

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:04:57 +0000

Enjoyable thread. Thanks, folks. The only one of you I disagree with completely is cmp who flatteringly put the success of my first photo down to technique. I’m a complete amateur, using decent but not professional equipment (a 7 megapixel pocket Canon) on the stock setting for landscape the camera offered. Then I just picked the image that I liked best. It really is lovely scenery; I was there.
Some of the systemic failures of modern architecture may be down to something quite different: the rejection of detail, of a need for visual interest at different scales you might call fractal – and that clearly holds of natural environments. Remember D�rer’s marvellous picture of a clump of grass http://www.abcgallery.com/D/durer/durer31.JPG . Close up, stone, wood and brick are interesting; cement and steel are boring.
BTW, Pinker doesn’t make the absurd claim that all our sense of natureal beauty is hardwired. I left out the evidence he reported that American adults like savannas too, but also the deciduous woods, mountainns and prairies they are familiar with. If you carried out the experiment on Yanomanis, you would expect them to like the rainforest they live in. The theory predicts only that they would prefer savanna to other unfamiliar environments. Taste obviously changes, as I documented; the question is whether there are constants behind it. Much twentieth-century art rejects this notion of common fundamental principles of aesthetics – maybe that’s precisely its problem.

By: Bruce Moomaw

Bruce Moomaw — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 04:55:38 +0000

But there has to be a psychological — and thus biological — reason why “smooth-looking” terrian looks more beautiful to humans than rugged terrain, too. May it be because smooth-looking terrain looks like a body of water or a plain of grass?

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:37:40 +0000

Simon’s law of scenery: All scenery looks beautiful from a sufficient distance.
I first formulated this principle while on a hike through the southern Negev desert. In every direction, the scene on the horizon was breathtakingly beautiful. Meanwhile, everything within thirty feet or so looked roughly like a large construction site.
The most widely admired settings, mountains and lakes, pretty much force the admirer to look at them (or their surroundings) from a distance. The most boring, flatlands and prairies, focus one’s attention on the immediate surroundings, for lack of distant features to admire. Other settings, such as forests and hills, look attractive approximately to the degree that they allow views from a distance.
I expect the reason has something to do with Swift’s observations about the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians: The former, being tiny, appeared beautiful because their imperfections were unnoticeably small, whereas the latter’s size exposed their every blemish and asymmetry. Likewise, distant scenery looks flawless, whereas the same scenery viewed up close just looks like a lot of gritty, chaotic nature.

By: cmp

cmp — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:35:04 +0000

While I’m generally sympathetic to evolutionary psychology, I find the hypothesis that humans have an esthetic preference for savanna landscapes hard-wired by evolutionary forces quite lame. Just because early human evolution may have occurred in such an environment doesn’t mean that there would be a reproductive advantage in an esthetic preference for it. Also, the esthetic superiority of your first photograph has a lot more to do with photographic technique issues than with a general esthetic preference for “open space.”

By: Bruce Moomaw

Bruce Moomaw — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:25:11 +0000

The Transamerica Pyramid is ugly as shit and considered ridiculous by virtually everyone who lives there. It is, after all, a pyramid with ears — or, as Anne Baxter (Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter) says, “a giant Ku Klux Klan hat.” Then we have the Guggenheim Museum — a giant concrete Slinky — and an endless plethora of modernistic churches that look like aircraaft carriers. (And don’t get me started on modern “sculpture”. Nor do I see you defending any 2-D art post-Manet — and virtually everyone agrees that his and van Gogh’s stuff is attractive.)
As for “the high and mighty” who “had a voice” back then: they were, of course, mostly the rulers of those societies — who were not artists and had pretty much the same tastes as the average man.
And as for folk art, I side with Tom Lehrer: the reason most folk art is so horrible is precisely tht it is created by the average man. This in no way contradicts my other statements; it merely follows from the obvious fact that good artists are such precisely because they come up with concepts which large numbers of other people could not come up with on their own, but can see new beauty in afterwards. And when this process is successful, it takes very little time for average people to see that new beauty — they don’t have to spend generations being brainwashed into seeing it (or, more accurately, pretending that they see it).
Really, though, the only parts of this whole argument that are relevant are:
(1) My original point — the “form follows function” school of architectural aesthetics was always ridiculous, and now we have a clearer understanding of WHY it is ridiculous.
(2) Any major public building put up should, whenever it is at all practical, have its design subject to approval by a majority vote of the people in the community who will have to look at the damn thing for decades. If this offends today’s fake artists, too bad.

By: wcw

wcw — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:50:54 +0000

I was going to argue, but Handley’s rants are too good to top. Kudos. Author!

By: Jack B. Nimble

Jack B. Nimble — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:30:45 +0000

What is absurd about this piece and evolutionary bio behavior absolutists is that it is easy to find objects of tremendous subjective beauty to many people that have absolutely no value for the holders of this perception.
Oh, by the way, esthetically I prefer the wild dangerous forest. Kinda blows your argument, huh?
Face it, science guys, some things are just not explainable. But hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m a staunch Darwinian and empiracist – I think science just won’t explain everything in the universe, that’s all.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:27:28 +0000

”
pointing out that during the Renaissance, you did not often hear the line “How modern and how ugly”, because the new artistic ideas being introduced then were NOT ugly.
”
Uhh, the reason you did not hear this is that the average prole in the Renaissance had no control over the means of production of books, and was illiterate. The only people who had any voice then were the high and mighty, the same crowd that you probably despise today.
More to the point consider say van Gogh or Manet. Are you willing to come out and say that these are ugly, and that most people with experience of them, ie most westerners find them ugly? Or is it, just maybe, that the new is always disturbing and takes some time to be assimiliated. Most non-western art, whether it’s pre-columbian from the Americas, Chola bronzes from India, or power figures from Africa, was greeted by a certain class of people in the West as quite repulsive. Do you go along with such judgements?
Meanwhile, of this modern architecture you hate. Does that include what? Geary? The Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur? Taipei 101? Oriental Pearl TV Tower in Shanghai? Library Tower in Los Angeles? The pyramid in San Francisco?
There were clearly some ghastly mistakes made in the mid-century, especially when it came to high rise living quarters; but of course the most obvious problem with these was that form did NOT follow function in spite of what the architects said. The reason buildings like Cabrini-Green were hated was that they were a stupid solution for the problem they were targetting. And, of course, when high rises are designed appropriately for their tenants, no-one is especially against them. I don’t think you’d find, to take one example, the people who live in Trump Tower in New York complaining about the look of their building.

By: Bruce Moomaw

Bruce Moomaw — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:02:57 +0000

My complaint was — to repeat — about (where architecture is concerned) the “form follows function” philosophy that gave us one rectangular box after another on the grounds that Ornamentation Is Bad. Tom Wolfe was hardly the first to complain about this — Norman Mailer, for instance, referred back in 1966 to most modern architecture as “Kleenex boxes with collodion patches stuck all over them”.
And my other point is that I’m in the majority in agreeing that most modern architecture — and most modern art — is ugly as shit. C.S. Lewis wrote a poem back in the 1940s pointing out that during the Renaissance, you did not often hear the line “How modern and how ugly”, because the new artistic ideas being introduced then were NOT ugly. The past century’s new artistic ideas, on the other hand, have appeared ugly, and/or simple-minded, to most people. There are many possible reasons for this — it may be that human artists have simply run out of good ideas (a possibility that forced the teenage John Stuart Mill into a state of severe depression back in the early 19t century). But I can’t help thinking that a failure to recognize that human standards of beauty are rooted in something in our psychology — and that this something must have strong evolutionary/biological connections — may be part of the problem.

By: The Unapologetic Mexican

The Unapologetic Mexican — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:49:49 +0000

I loved this post. Thank you.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:02:13 +0000

I admire a lot of what Pinker says; he really is very interesting regarding language. But this sort of stretching of evolutionary psychology is just stupid; it’s trying to claim far too much based on far too little data.
Let’s actually get realistic. Have any of you actually seen the African savanna? Sure the animals look nice (from a safe distance or from a helicopter) but the countryside itself looks “stark and severe”, ie nice to see in photos but you wouldn’t want to live there. The tropics (especially the ultra-tamed tropics of Europe) are what look especially nice to live. And if the issue is only aesthetics, the fact is that pretty much every landscape on earth looks good under the right conditions. We see photos of deserts, of mountains, of polar wilderness, of coral reefs; all look lovely, all not places we want to live.
There is probably something going on here in terms of evolutionary psychology; some balance of order vs disorder, something about areas of color that have a subtle texture, maybe even something to do with that ultra-hyped child of the 80s, fractals. But it has, IMHO, and I would say the evidence completely backs me up, very little to do with ways in which these scenes look like rift Africa.
And as for Bruce Moomaw, damn it dude. The only thing more lame than a linguist claiming that evolutionary psychology supports his theory of art is someone who hates modern art claimning that evolutionary psychology supports his theory of art. OK, you don’t like modern art; that’s fine, spend lots of time at the Getty with other people who share your tastes; but don’t make sly insinuations about the rest of us. There are real complaints to be made about modern architecture, ways in which it is non-functional, and the the stupidity of basing architecture on a theory, especially a poorly-thought out, never actually tested, theory. But you lose credibility when you come acrosss as some fogey complaining about how it all went wrong after 1900 (or maybe after 1550 with the counter-reformation; or maybe the real mistake was to go in for gothic cathedrals instead of creating more buildings on the tried-and-true Stonehenge design, which certainly isn’t boxy).

By: Swift Loris

Swift Loris — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:34:11 +0000

“What about caves?”
Er, we seem to like living inside boxes in northern areas, so perhaps the hardwire preference for open space *has* had time to change. We’ve made improvements, of course, to make our constructed caves less scary, specifically windows; but interestingly, we put great value on having spacious views from those windows. Perhaps we’re trying to have it both ways. Or were caves with a view of the savannah more highly prized back when they were our dwellings?

By: Mark Kleiman

Mark Kleiman — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:34:14 +0000

Macaulay offers still a third explanation: mountains, forests, and moors were scary and therefore ugly as long as they were filled with bandits and wolves. Tamed, they became beautiful. On his account, the beauty of the Scots Highlands is attributable to the butchery of Culloden. A grim thought, but perhaps true nonetheless.

By: Bruce Moomaw

Bruce Moomaw — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:30:05 +0000

It’s about time somebody noted that human standards of artistic beauty are connected with our biological/evolutionary background — something which modern artists and architects seem totally unaware of. It’s only their ignorance of that fact that them to peddle such aesthetic nonsense as the “form should follow function” principle. In SOME cases, when form follows function, it produces forms which people consider beautiful, such as streamlining. But the function of a building is simply to be a box, and there is nothing intrinsically beautiful to humans about a box — because one doesn’t encounter anything remotely like it in the kinds of natural environments, phenomena and living things that appeal to us.