[Pen-l] Evolutionary psychology and art

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Over the next week or so I am going to be blogging about evolutionary 
psychology (the more au courant term for sociobiology) that will involve 
a return to Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee”, a book that 
foreshadowed his more well-known works as well as his boneheaded New 
Yorker article. I will also be looking at Napoleon Chagnon, the 
anthropologist who shared Diamond’s Hobbesian take on 
hunting-and-gathering peoples—in his case the Yanomami rather than the 
Papuan New Guinea highland tribes.

In chapter 9 of “The Third Chimpanzee”, Diamond writes about the “Animal 
Origins of Art”. He begins with a discussion of Siri’s drawings that 
command prices up to $500 and about which Willem de Kooning had this to 
say: “They had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality”.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/evolutionary-psychology-and-art/
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