Evolution and the pursuit of fiction

Evolutionary psychology explains the root of our pursuit of artistic expression, and the intense desire to consume it, according to Denis Dutton:

"Human beings expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment — music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new. The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. [...]

The universal fascination with fictions is a curious thing. If human beings were attracted only to true narratives, factual reports that describe the real world, the attraction could be attributed to utility. We might imagine that just as early homo sapiens needed to hew sharp adzes and know the ways of game animals, so they needed to employ language accurately to describe themselves and their environment and to communicate truths to each other. Were that the case, there would be no “problem of fiction,” because there would be no fiction: the only alternatives to desirable truth would be unintentional mistakes or intentional lies. Such Pleistocene Gradgrinds would be about as eager to waste linguistic effort creating fables and fictions as they would be to waste their manual skills laboring to produce dull adzes. We can speculate even that the enjoyment of fictions might have put them at an adaptive disadvantage against more Gradgrindish neighboring tribes: homo sapiens would in such a circumstance have evolved to react to untrue, made-up stories much as it reacts to the smell of rotting meat. Now as it happens, this speculation does not accord with facts: the human reaction to fictions, at least when they are properly understood to be fictions, is not aversion, but runs anywhere from boredom to amusement to intense pleasure."

Good news for readers and writers, regardless of what happens to the publishing industry: humans will always pursue the creative expressions, as well as be driven to it!

Sources:
http://www.denisdutton.com/carroll_review.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2009/06/02/f-vp-handler.html

Cold War cultural propaganda

"For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash""... source

Let's not forget that Hollywood was a propaganda weapon too, intended, and quite successfully, to spread American values abroad.

Artists working for the predatory animal

In between challenging books, or after a book that had a profound impact on me, I like to pick up something neutral, or something that I already know and enjoy reading, such as Turgenev's or Chekhov's short stories. I read the latter last weekend, to cracking freeze, and an inch of snow:

"Science and art, when they are true, are directed not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the general--they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, then they only complicate and encumber life. All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state of things." Anton Chekhov, in "The House with the Mezzanine."

The photograph shows Chekhov's grave.

How to behead your wife

Peculiar carving on one of the doors to the Cathedral in Cuernavaca:

Husband beheading an unfaithful wife?

Feast for the eyes

Europeans to feast their eyes. To sample such great Mexican icons as Rivera, Siqueiros or Orozco, Europeans had to cross the Ocean. Now, for the first time, one has only to cross the English Channel. Great Mexican prints are available for viewing at the British Museum in London. The exhibit has an interesting slant: Revolution. What else?

The current exhibition at the British Museum of Mexican printmaking in the early 20th century is the first ever in Europe. For most people, Mexico is more often associated with one of the leading art forms of Twentieth Century―the huge murals of “los tres grandes” of Mexican art: Diego Rivera, David Álfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. MORE

Exhibit runs till April 5.

Diego Rivera: Emiliano Zapata


Diego Rivera: Frida Kahlo