Denis Dutton — The Art Instinct, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Arts & Letters Daily, and the Bad Writing Contest (1944–2010)

Denis Dutton was an American philosopher of art — born in Los Angeles in 1944, son of booksellers who founded Dutton's Books, an independent bookstore chain, educated at UC Santa Barbara where he earned his BA in 1966 and PhD in 1975, spending the years between degrees in India with the Peace Corps learning to play sitar, teaching philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand from 1984 until his death from cancer on 28 December 2010, the day after the University of Canterbury awarded him a research medal — who was simultaneously a philosopher of art with a serious scholarly agenda, a media entrepreneur who founded Arts & Letters Daily (described by the Guardian as the best website in the world), the editor of "Philosophy and Literature" who ran the Bad Writing Contest, and the author of "The Art Instinct" (2009), a Darwinian account of beauty that reached a general audience comparable to Steven Pinker's work on language and Steven Levitt's on economics.

He was a man of multiple intellectual projects that converged on a single underlying commitment: that the humanities had allowed themselves to be captured by theoretical frameworks — cultural constructionism, postmodern relativism, obscurantist jargon — that were both intellectually dishonest and destructive of genuine understanding of art, beauty, and human nature. Against these he proposed a naturalistic aesthetics grounded in evolution — and he demonstrated his commitment to clarity and accountability by running a competition to embarrass the worst academic prose in English.

His central concern: that the experience of beauty, the creation of art, and the appreciation of skill were not culturally constructed variables but deep evolutionary features of human nature — features that appeared across cultures, across history, and across the entire recorded range of human artistic production — and that any aesthetics that ignored this was missing what was most fundamental about the phenomena it claimed to explain.

The Art Instinct — Beauty as Evolutionary Adaptation

Dutton's 2009 "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution" was his most ambitious and most accessible work — an attempt to do for aesthetics what Steven Pinker had done for language and what evolutionary psychology more broadly had done for social behavior: to show that what had seemed like a culturally variable, socially constructed phenomenon was in fact shaped by evolutionary pressures that produced characteristic universals across all human societies.

His central argument: aesthetic preferences were not arbitrary cultural accidents but reflections of selection pressures operating on our Pleistocene ancestors. The widespread human preference for landscapes featuring water, open ground, and scattered trees — the savanna environment in which Homo sapiens evolved — was one piece of evidence. The cross-cultural appreciation for virtuoso skill — the ability to do something that most people cannot — was another. The universal human engagement with narrative fiction, with music, with visual representation, with decorative craft — all were present in every human society ever recorded, suggesting something more fundamental than cultural transmission.

Dutton distinguished between two evolutionary mechanisms that might explain art: natural selection (art as adaptation that increased fitness directly) and sexual selection (art as honest signal of fitness in the Zahavian sense — like the peacock's tail, costly to produce and therefore reliable as a signal of genetic quality and cognitive capacity). He argued that both mechanisms were at work, with sexual selection being particularly important for explaining the extravagant elaboration of artistic skill beyond any obvious survival utility.

"I have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. Beauty is an adaptive effect which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No — it's deep in our minds, a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors."

— Dutton, TED Talk 2010

The Twelve Cluster Criteria — Defining Art Across Cultures

Central to Dutton's account was his attempt to define art not by a single necessary and sufficient condition — which no philosopher had managed to provide satisfactorily — but by a cluster of criteria that paradigmatic works of art tended to satisfy. His twelve criteria included: direct pleasure (art valued for immediate experience), skill and virtuosity, style, novelty and creativity, criticism, representation, special focus, expressive individuality, emotional saturation, intellectual challenge, art traditions and institutions, and imaginative experience.

No single criterion was necessary — a work could count as art without satisfying all twelve — but the cluster constituted the "conceptual center" of the category around which judgments in specific cases orbited. Critics argued that the cluster approach was not genuinely a definition and that the criteria were not clearly distinguished from evaluation. Dutton's defenders argued that it was more honest than attempts to find a single essence that had repeatedly failed — that the cluster approach reflected the genuine structure of the concept rather than imposing artificial tidiness on it.

"Human tastes in the arts are evolutionary traits, shaped by Darwinian selection. They are not, as the past century of art criticism and academic theory would have it, just 'socially constructed.' Our love of beauty is inborn, and many aesthetic tastes are shared across remote cultures."

Arts & Letters Daily — The Website That Changed Intellectual Culture

Dutton's most practically influential creation was arguably not his academic work but Arts & Letters Daily — the website he founded in 1998 that aggregated links to essays, reviews, and articles across the web on literature, art, science, and politics, each link accompanied by a pithy teaser written by Dutton himself. The Guardian named it the best website in the world. It became one of the most heavily trafficked sites anywhere for news and opinion in ideas.

The model was deceptively simple — a carefully curated daily selection of the best writing available on the web with brief descriptions precise enough to let readers decide whether they wanted to follow each link — but its execution required the taste, breadth of reading, and economy of expression that Dutton had developed as a philosopher and writer. It functioned as a daily demonstration of his conviction that good writing, clear thinking, and genuine intellectual substance were not confined to academic journals but were available across the full range of intellectual culture.

"Arts & Letters Daily: the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas — described by the Guardian as the best website in the world and securing Dutton a place among the most influential media personalities."

The Bad Writing Contest — Against Academic Obscurantism

As editor of "Philosophy and Literature," Dutton ran the Bad Writing Contest for several years — an annual competition to find the most pretentious, jargon-laden, obscurantist academic prose in the humanities. The contest's purpose was stated plainly: to "expose pretentious, swaggering gibberish passed off as scholarship at leading universities."

The winners were illustrious. In 1995, Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson won. In 1998, Judith Butler received first place for a sentence from the journal diacritics that Dutton published in full — a sentence of remarkable length and density that appeared to say nothing in the most complex possible way. Butler defended her writing in the New York Times, arguing that philosophical complexity required complex expression. Dutton's counter was simple: the best philosophers — Hume, Kant, Aristotle — wrote with clarity proportional to their difficulty. Difficulty of thought was not a justification for opacity of expression. The contest identified a real phenomenon — academic prose that used complexity as camouflage for absence of content — and named it with the precision of someone who had spent years reading both the good and the bad at the same time.

"The Bad Writing Contest was designed to expose 'pretentious, swaggering gibberish passed off as scholarship at leading universities' — the view that genuine philosophical complexity required complex expression could not survive comparison with Hume, Kant, or Aristotle."

The Forger's Art — Authenticity and Value

Earlier in his career Dutton had edited and contributed to "The Forger's Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art" (1983) — a collection exploring one of the most philosophically productive questions in the theory of art: why should a perfect forgery be worth less than an original? If two objects are perceptually indistinguishable, what exactly does the difference in their value rest on?

The puzzle was not merely academic. It bore on the nature of artistic authenticity, on what we valued in art, and on whether those values were coherent. Dutton's own view was that authenticity mattered because the value of art was partly historical and partly performative — a painting by Rembrandt was valuable partly as a record of what Rembrandt achieved, of the specific skill displayed in producing that specific object under those specific conditions. A forgery, however perfect visually, could not be that record. The aesthetic experience of a genuine Rembrandt included the experience of confronting that achievement — not just the visual patterns on the canvas.

"We find beauty in something done well — from Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. The value of the original is inseparable from its record of what was achieved under what conditions."

Legacy — The Philosopher as Public Intellectual

Dutton died on 28 December 2010, the day after the University of Canterbury awarded him its research medal at its December graduation ceremony — a coincidence of timing that struck those who knew him as characteristic of the slightly absurdist drama his life tended to generate. He had lived long enough to see "The Art Instinct" reach a genuinely wide audience, to give a TED talk that was watched by millions, and to see Arts & Letters Daily cited as one of the transformative intellectual websites of the early internet era.

On CivSim he belongs alongside Steven Pinker, E. O. Wilson, and Ellen Dissanayake — the naturalist tradition in the humanities that argued that human culture could not be understood in isolation from human biology, and that the attempt to do so had produced theoretical frameworks that were less explanatory than their proponents claimed. His specific challenge to Universal Humanism is the aesthetic one: that beauty and art are not optional ornaments to human life that a well-provisioned society might or might not choose to cultivate, but evolutionary features of human nature as fundamental as language or sociality — and that a philosophy of the good life for all humanity must account for why human beings have always made art, even when starving, even under oppression, even when it served no obvious utility.

"Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists."

— Dutton, TED Talk 2010