Art, Landscape, and Pleistocene Life
Denis Dutton
1
America’s Most Wanted was a strange stunt, even by the inflated standards of the contemporary art scene. In 1993, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid procured support from The Nation Foundation to study the artistic preferences of people in fifteen countries. They oversaw a detailed worldwide poll, conducted for them in the US by Marttila & Kiley, Inc., a Boston company, and on commission by various other public-opinion firms overseas. In some locales, the polls were followed up with town hall meetings and videotaped focus groups. All subjects were asked what they would like to see a picture of, whether they preferred interior or landscape scenes, what kind of animals they liked, favourite colours, what sorts of people they enjoyed seeing depicted, famous or ordinary, whether clothed, and so forth. Extrapolated to the general populations of the countries polled, the graphs and tables of figures produced in Komar and Melamid’s ‘People’s Choice’ project claims to tell us the artistic preferences of ‘close to two billion people’. But their study did not aim merely at determining numerical preferences: these talented artists then produced the typically most-wanted and least-wanted paintings for every country in the study—pastiches based on favourite colours, shapes and subject-matters for each nationality.1
The least-wanted paintings are bad news for anyone hoping to see modernist abstraction achieve mass acceptance. People in almost all nations disliked abstract designs of jagged shapes created with a thick impasto and the commonly despised colours of gold, orange, yellow and teal. This cross-cultural similarity of negative opinion was matched on the positive side by another remarkable uniformity of sentiment: almost invariably, the most-wanted painting was a landscape with water, people and animals. As the overwhelmingly favourite colour in the world turned out to be blue, Komar and Melamid used blue as the dominant colour of their landscapes. Their America’s Most Wanted combined a liking for historical figures, children and wild animals by placing George Washington on a green, grassy area beside an attractive river or lake. Near him walk three clean-cut youngsters, looking like vacationers at Disneyland; to their right, two deer cavort, while in the water behind Washington a hippopotamus bellows.
To consider the survey seriously and then turn to Komar and Melamid’s painted results is to realise you’ve been conned. It is as though The Nation Foundation was persuaded by two clever chefs to commission an expensive poll to determine America’s most-wanted food. The chefs study the resulting statistical preferences—a highly varied list that is nevertheless topped by ice cream, pizza, hamburgers and chocolate—and then come up with America’s Most-Wanted Food: hamburger-flavoured ice cream with chocolate-coated pizza nuggets. Needless to say, just because people like George Washington, African game and children in their pictures, it doesn’t follow that they want them all in the same picture.
It would be wrong, however, to write off the ‘People’s Choice’ project as worthless. In fact, it revealed one stunning fact: people in cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of favourite pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures and animals. More remarkable still was the fact that people in different parts of the world preferred landscapes of a fairly standardised type: Kenyans appeared to like landscapes that more resembled upstate New York than what we might think of as the present flora and terrain of Kenya. In an interview in Painting by Numbers, the book that presented the data and paintings for the project, Alexander Melamid remarks:
It might seem like something funny, but, you know, I’m thinking that this blue landscape is more serious than we first believed. Talking to people in the focus groups before we did our poll and at the town hall meetings around the country after … almost everyone you talk to directly—and we’ve already talked to hundreds of people—they have this blue landscape in their head. It sits there, and it is not a joke. They can see it, down to the smallest detail. So I’m wondering, maybe the blue landscape is genetically imprinted in us, that it’s the paradise within, that we came from the blue landscape and we want it.… We [have? Please check original.]now completed polls in many countries—China, Kenya, Iceland, and so on—and the results are strikingly similar. Can you believe it? Kenya and Iceland—what can be more different in the whole fucking world—and both want blue landscapes.
He goes on to says that a dream of modernism was to ‘find universal art’, and that ‘the square was what could unite people’. But this turns out to be wrong: ‘The blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind’.
Komar and Melamid drop the subject, but it is raised again by Arthur Danto in his philosophical meditation on the most-wanted paintings in Painting by Numbers. He is annoyed by George Washington and a hippo sharing the scene, calling America’s Most Wanted ‘mischievous’. The painting ‘has no place in the world of art at all’. This putatively most-wanted work of art is, in the end, Danto says, a painting no one actually wants.2
Danto finds it predictable that a poll of American tastes should yield a landscape in ‘Hudson River Biedermeier’ style. But he, too, is surprised that
throughout the world the results have been strikingly congruent, in the sense that each country’s Most Wanted looks like, give or take a few details, every other Most Wanted.... And it is at the very least cause for reflection that what randomly selected populations of the world round ‘most want’ are paintings in the generic, all-purpose realist style the artists invented for America’s Most Wanted…. The ‘most wanted painting’, speaking transnationally, is a nineteenth-century landscape … the kind of painting whose degenerate descendents embellish calendars from Kalamazoo to Kenya.
Then Danto throws out a remark which, if true, would undermine a generation or two of art theory (including Danto’s own it’s-theory-that-makes-art art theory): ‘The 44-percent-blue landscape with water and trees must be the a priori aesthetic universal, what everyone who thinks of art first thinks of, as if modernism never happened’.
As if modernism never happened? Having put forward this hypothetical challenge to his own deeply held theoretical commitments, Danto then tries to explain the uncanny cross-cultural uniformity: ‘It is possible, of course, that everyone’s concept of art was formed by calendars (even in Kenya), which now constitutes a sort of paradigm of what everyone thinks of when they think of art’. [Page?] Referring to psychological research that shows that there are paradigms that govern what people will think of first when asked to identify something in a category (asked to name a bird, people will usually think robin or sparrow, not albatross or kiwi), Danto tries to argue that calendars have come to govern worldwide what people initially think of when they think of art. This would explain, he suggests, the worldwide resistance to modernism. ‘It is altogether likely’, he says, ‘that what Komar and Melamid have unearthed is less what people prefer than what they are most familiar with in paintings’.
Danto’s analysis sticks by the presupposition that picture preferences are indefinitely malleable and include no underlying preferences that are not socially inculcated, or least derived from everyday familiarity. When we think of a robin (instead of a grebe) if asked to imagine a bird, or think of a man (instead of a woman) if asked to imagine an airline pilot, we fall victim to stereotypes inductively derived from childhood socialisation—our experiences of walking in the park or flying in airplanes. Danto affirms this social fact while denying that there might be some kind of identifiable category of natural interests in pictorial representations. For Danto, it all must come down in the end to enculturation. ‘That would be why’, Danto claims, ‘when throughout history anything has deviated significantly from the predominantly blue landscape, the spontaneous response has been that it is not art’.[Page?] The true villain in the persistent, worldwide resistance to modernism—roughly, abstraction—is therefore the world calendar industry: ‘Why else would the Kenyans, for example, come out with the same kind of painting as everyone else even though 70% of them answered “African” to question 37—“If you had to choose from the following list, which type of art would you say you prefer?”—when the other choices were Asian, American, and European?’ Danto then concludes his analysis with three contentious sentences:
There is nothing in the least African about the Hudson River Biedermeier style of landscape with water. But it may be exactly with reference to such images that Kenyans learned the meaning of art. It is no accident that in the Kenyan questionnaire, in response to the question on what types of art people have in their homes, 91 percent mentioned prints from calendars (though, in fairness, 72 percent mentioned ‘prints or posters’).
The way that Danto drives home his position with regard to the blue landscapes is remarkably consistent and thoughtful. It is also is profoundly wrong. First, an incidental point: it is incorrect to say that there is nothing African about the landscape in America’s Most Wanted. Remove George Washington, the children and the deer, and, even with the apparently deciduous tree in the foreground, the landscape could pass for one of the mountainous areas of east Africa, e.g., much of Mount Kenya National Park. Speaking of visual stereotypes, for east Africa, Danto himself may be in thrall of images of the dusty plains that extend from eastern Kenya and into Somalia and Ethiopia. But central Kenya has many areas with mountains, rivers and lakes. Even if most Kenyans involved with the poll did not live in the mountainous areas, they would know of them.
Danto argues that if Kenyan landscape preferences happen to coincide with Hudson River Biedermeier, it is because Hudson River imagery, however alien to the actual countryside Africans see from their windows, has nevertheless embedded itself in African minds. Such imagery would have to be powerful to replace in the African imagination the very environment in which Africans are raised, and Danto feels he has fingered its source: it is the calendars that 91% of Africans report having in their homes. Although he momentarily raises the theoretical possibility that a liking for blue landscapes might be an innate feature of human mentality, Danto quickly averts from the notion, placing the blame squarely on the calendar industry. In Danto’s frame, a general liking for images of a certain type on the part of Africans can only be explained by exposure to other images, a process of visual enculturation. This is consistent with Danto’s art critic’s regard for the issue: he sees America’s Most Wanted in terms of Biedermeier and Hudson River School styles, rather than seeing, Komar and Melamid’s jokes aside, the painting for what it is as a realist representation: a generic, lushly forested scene of hills surrounding water that could be anywhere from New York to New Zealand to Alaska to Asia to Africa.
Danto’s certainty that such landscape tastes must be acquired in the life of individuals though exposure to images is another unexamined presupposition, and a false one at that. Human and animal life in general may be full of interests, inclinations and sentiments that are not learned, either from the experience of images or of anything else, though they may be elicited and developed by experience and learning. An example: the window of my office at the New Zealand university where I teach is high and its ledge offers a convenient perch and nesting-place for pigeons. Whatever their charms, these creatures, alas, are extremely messy; they make the ledge so unhygienic that the window must be kept shut at all times. How to keep them away? My solution is a rubber snake on the ledge. I have seen the birds land on the ledge, see the snake, and immediately depart. They don’t come back. The odd fact is that, although European pigeons have been in New Zealand for a couple of hundred pigeon generations, there are no snakes in New Zealand and never have been. The phobic reaction of the birds is therefore learned neither from exposure to snakes nor from images of snakes. In snake-free New Zealand it is a perfect instance of a pure atavism: an innate, natural response that is passed, unnecessarily in these parts, from generation to generation of pigeons.
In his famous experiments, B.F. Skinner extrapolated from pigeon to human behaviour: birds can be conditioned to respond to any (to them) intelligible stimulus, so on this blank-slate model can human beings also be conditioned, certainly with regard to values and preferences. Human beings are, of course, by comparison to pigeons, vastly complex. Their responses to snakes are complicated and highly variable because their conditioning is so multifarious, involving for an individual questions of local culture and traditions and mythologies, his or her knowledge of animals and personal history and experiences, for example, in visiting zoos or in viewing films where snakes figure in a story.
This complexity does not mean, however, that people’s, let alone pigeons’, reactions to snakes is infinitely malleable, that such responses are arbitrary cultural constructs, reducible to nothing but conditioning. Poisonous snakes are common in much of the world, and were killing early mammals even before the extinction of the dinosaurs. While phobic reactions to snakes vary with individuals—indeed, many people can learn to enjoy their company as pets or at least as objects of pleasurable study—a statistically general fear of snakes is a persistent, genetically determined element of the human personality. Even when it does not appear spontaneously, this fear is quickly and easily acquired, unlike a fear of even more common deadly threats for today, such as knives or frayed electrical cords. Human beings share this fear with Old World monkeys and apes; we also share with these primates a fascination with snakes. In our case, fascination expresses itself in the continual use of snakes and serpents in myth and literature worldwide, going back to stories of the Garden of Eden, to Chinese mythology, and beyond.3