As a regular visitor to Arts & Letters Daily, the broadsheet-style web portal of ideas founded by New Zealand philosopher Denis Dutton and now operated by the Chronicle of Higher Education, I was confronted daily with an advertisement for Dutton's book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. Yet I avoided it. I had grown weary of the creation-evolution and deism-atheism debates that pockmark the media and dominate First Things, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. As a Christian in the arts, a role that comes with many professional disadvantages, I can at least be thankful that my work does not put me in the crosshairs of the science wars. Moreover, from what I'd heard and read from biologist Stephen Jay Gould and psychologist Steven Pinker, evolution does not appear to take art too seriously. Gould says that art is a "spandral," that is, an open space created by necessary architectural structures in the brain, which is "filled in" by art and other kinds of less necessary activities. Pinker argues that art amounts to "Sunday afternoon projects" and "cheesecake" for the mind. I've heard more or less similar views voiced outside the evolutionary framework by university administrators and college deans, art collectors and curators, "creativity artsy types," and many evangelicals. The Art Instinct seemed yet another argument for undermining the seriousness of art—and hence undermining my project as a critic, curator, and educator.

However, while scouring the stacks in my university's library this summer, I came across a copy of The Art Instinct and decided to read it. To my surprise, some of Dutton's ideas have helped me develop and refine some of my views on art that I have pursued since the publication of my book God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. It is these areas of Dutton's book that have helped me think about my work as a critic and curator on which I focus in this review. I leave engagement with the full scope of Dutton's book, including its weaknesses and blind spots, to others.

Dutton unloads on his fellow secular aestheticians and evolutionary scientists for misconstruing the nature of art and devaluing its importance, arguing that they have made too much of cultural differences. Drawing on his own anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea, Dutton argues that artistic practice is cross-cultural and is the product of an evolutionary imprint developed during the nearly two million years of the Pleistocene Era, in which homo sapiens emerged with its modern-day attributes. Dutton enlists evolutionary biology to demonstrate the universal characteristics of humanity, which art reveals. Even though art is a profoundly historical and contextual practice, it is not so "all the way down": arts works and reworks the stuff that has become our genetic imprint. Therefore, it is intellectually lazy for academics to assume that "art" is only a Western concept. Dutton is critical of those theorists, like Arthur Danto and George Dickie, who take marginal and boundary-pushing works of art, like Marcel Duchamp's infamous readymade, Fountain (1917) and make them the centerpiece of a theory of art. Rather, Dutton argues, let those marginal works remain at the margins, where they were meant to be, and address the cluster of attributes that seem to form the core not only of a Western understanding of art but of a cross-cultural one as well.

Dutton also takes on Gould and Pinker. Through his analysis of art and natural selection, Dutton suggests that it is fruitless to argue whether the arts are an adaption or can be dismissed as by-products of adaption (like Pinker's cheesecake). Rather, it is more pertinent to "show how their existence and character are connected to Pleistocene interests, preferences, and capacities." Unlike Gould and Pinker, who consider art to be the result of an overly developed brain looking for intellectual steam to blow off, Dutton argues that art reworks and reactivates fundamental aspects of human consciousness. If Darwin revealed the reality of Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw," Dutton suggests that art is a necessary weapon in this bloody act of survival, for it "provides us with templates, mental maps for emotional life" as we "work out levels of intentionality." Art is not fundamentally about self-expression, celebrating creativity, or even about representing the spiritual or the transcendent. It involves making decisions in the world.

The most provocative and useful chapter in The Art Instinct for my own work at the moment is the first. Dutton discusses the research project in the mid-1990s of two conceptual artists, Komar and Melamid, which explored what elements of painting people are most likely to respond to. And to their surprise, most responded to a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals. Dutton quotes one of the surprised artists who said that such landscapes seem "genetically imprinted on us." No matter where the respondents lived and the landscapes with which they were most familiar, no matter their cultural or social upbringing, the majority responded in the same way. For Dutton this is not, as Arthur Danto argued in his review of the project in The Nation, because people around the world have been hopelessly influenced by calendar art, but because it is part of our genetic template developed in the African savannas during the end of the Pleistocene Era 50,000 years ago. Dutton argues that "human landscape tastes are not just products of social conditioning"; rather, they reflect "prehistoric tastes." I was definitely not expecting this.

The landscape that confronted our ancient ancestors, Dutton argues, is a landscape that requires decision-making: follow the river where other threatening animals might be, or take another course? Our survival depended on the wise decisions of our prehistoric relatives. Dutton suggests that the pleasure we experience with some painting is due to its capacity to touch or rekindle this genetic template, stirring up within us these life and death decisions, making them present to us. As in the case with fiction, landscape painting makes use of two important elements, a human will and some kind of resistance to it. "We are what we are today," Dutton writes, "because our primordial ancestors followed paths/riverbeds over the horizon. At such moments we confront remnants of our own species' ancient past." Art has the potential—and perhaps the responsibility—to bring such remnants into the present, our present.

The implications of this argument are significant. First, the power of this genetic landscape template is the source of both kitsch and authentic art, the source of Thomas Kinkade and Bob Ross as well as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. While the former merely skims off the top of this genetic imprint, the latter plumbs its emotional depths, reworks it, and presents it anew. Second, Dutton's argument offers a critical perspective from which to claim that some examples of modern art, like Duchamp's Fountain or perhaps even Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, which seem to ignore this genetic template, remain central to the art world only because of theoretical discourse that sustains them. Perhaps one of the roles of art criticism is not to prop up art in this manner, floating it on the raft of discourse, but to show how and in what ways the work of art itself participates in enlivening this genetic imprint.

Dutton's book has a direct bearing on my most recent project. I am curating The Wanderer: Foreign Landscapes of Enrique Martínez Celaya at the Museum of Biblical Art (MoBIA) in New York City this fall. (Concurrent with this exhibition is Martínez Celaya's presentation of four monumental paintings at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.) The exhibition explores the theme of figure and landscape in Martínez Celaya's work through the lens of the biblical narratives that have influenced his work indirectly through his reading of Robert Frost, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Søren Kierkegaard, and Herman Hesse, among many others. The biblical narratives are much more than illustrations of themes like Exile, Exodus, Atonement, Salvation, Sacrifice, Redemption, and Forgiveness. They are concrete and particular instances of the figure in the landscape, whether Adam, Cain, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Jesus, or Paul, who is called, at a particular moment, to act in the world. Whether patriarch, prophet, king, disciple, leper, or beggar, the person who acts, in obedience or in defiance of God, must choose to act and do so alone. Yet we cannot contemplate this structural framework of figure and landscape at a distance. We must choose with the person who is called to act. Jesus, who recapitulates and embodies the entire figure and landscape tradition in the biblical narratives, demands an answer—Who do you say that I am?

Dutton's book suggests that the power of art lies somewhere near this demand to choose, to act in the world with conviction. Perhaps the power of the biblical narratives—including those of the writers influenced by them, as well as Martínez Celaya's work, which is an aesthetic reflection on these narratives—is due in part to their capacity to participate in and creatively rework the genetic imprint of the Pleistocene landscape.

Daniel A. Siedell is assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and director of special projects at Whale & Star, the studio of Enrique Martínez Celaya in Miami, Florida. He is the author of God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Baker Academic).

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