RIP Denis Dutton
Denis Dutton, founder of the indispensable website Arts & Letters Daily, passed away this week, at 66 years old. Dutton, who was a longtime philosopher of beauty, among other things, at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, died of cancer two days ago.
Adam Keiper, writing at National Review Online, remembers Dutton as a man with a "twinkle in his eye":
A professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Dutton was a longtime editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, which earned renown in the 1990s for its opposition to wretched writing from the academy. For a few years, the journal ran a Bad Writing Contest that dipped into the streams of fashionable nonsense gushing from university English and philosophy departments to pick the worst of the worst. In 1996, the journal also published Alan Sokal’s essay explaining and justifying the brilliant prank he had pulled on the postmodernist journal Social Text.
AL Daily, which Dutton founded in 1998 and edited ever since, is a catalogue of essays, articles, and reviews from around the web. Dutton’s nose for interesting essays and his ear for clear writing kept AL Daily highbrow without ever being hifalutin. The site surely owes much of its enormous popularity to its simplicity — just a few links every day, each with a pithy and enticing blurb. Dutton understood that in an age of overabundant information, less can be more....
Dutton himself wrote many essays and reviews (collected on DenisDutton.com) but only one book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, published about two years ago. It’s a smart and careful argument about what science might teach us about art and criticism, and what art might tell us about human origins
To see Dutton in action, watch the video below, where he asks and and answers the question: how can we explain the universality of beauty? Dutton reasons that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Rather, "Beauty is nature's way of keeping at a distance." He continues:
We find beauty in something done well. So the next time you pass by a jewelry window displaying a beautiful tear-drop shaped stone, don't be so sure that it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No.
He elegantly comes to this conclusion via his "Darwinian theory of beauty," explained below. Though I can't fully jump on board with Dutton's explanation of beauty--rooted in Darwinian materialism--I still find it fascinating, and think he makes some illuminating and valid points.
Dutton was a man of letters, in the truest sense. May he rest in peace.
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Aug '10
Re: RIP Denis Dutton
Emily Thanks for posting this . I put something up at member feed as well. ALDaily is such an oasis on the vast Internet . Denis was a responsive editor who listened to his readers and provided me with lots of wonderful books and loads of information, sometimes germane and often wonderfully obscure. We hope his colleagues will continue the tradition. I think this has been my home page for 10 years.
Re: RIP Denis Dutton
I saw your very thoughtful and touching post, flownover. I too have my homepage set to aldaily, and find it to be one of the most interesting and edifying websites on the internet. I wonder who will take the site over now?
Are you familiar with Dutton's theories of beauty, as in the vid above? Would love your thoughts on them. On the one hand they're very culturally traditionalist (take his view on the universality of beauty). On the other hand, he grounds his views of beauty in Darwin, which is a hard pill for me to swallow. If Dutton is right, and beauty is a by-product of Darwinianism, then doesn't that mean that beauty is materialistic? And if so, doesn't that deprive beauty of any higher transcendental meaning that it might (and I think does) have.
Aug '10
Re: RIP Denis Dutton
Emily,
Between Denis and Terry Teachout, many unread books strain the shelves of my library , I haven't read this yet. Don't see anything wrong with the beauty of our own tools . Had my epiphany showing my kids through the Natural History Museum and some totemic boogeyman from Oceania circa 1850. (The Culture Halls)
The vast gap between those artworks and a Bach Partita had me dragging them off to gaze upon the decorative arts from 17th century Europe. That meant beauty and achievement. Materialistic ? Maybe . Proud ? Definitely. Dutton may have been right . I take great pride in being a homo sapiens, especially a member of modern Western Civilization .
Our artwork certainly exceeds that of the turkey vulture, but their ability to soar is pretty impressive and beautiful. His analogy of the pea hen and the pea cock feathers misuses the word beauty, confusing it with "horny" I think. The transcendentalism you feel is missing probably goes right back to the religious arguments with Darwinism. God's gift of so much beauty easily exceeds our ability to quantify it much past "faith".
Edited on Dec 29, 2010 at 10:47amRe: RIP Denis Dutton
This is indeed sad news. Denis will be missed by all who knew him, as well as the even greater number of people who went to his site. He leaves behind an impressive legacy in AL Daily.
Oct '10
Re: RIP Denis Dutton
WHAT a loss! A great friend of Denis's introduced us by e-mail, and I was so looking forward to meeting him. His writings and a few e-mails gave me a great, positive sense of the man.
What a loss...and at such a young age by today's standards. One more example of life's unfairness and fragility.