hours: unknown, but I’ve renewed this book eleven times.
Reading is research, everything is evidence.
From a conversation started through Un sou pour vos pensees (2012) came a rough quote attributed to Einstein along the lines of ‘What does a fish know of the sea.’ Which I instantly liked but thinking about it this week, there’s a big difference between the brain of a Halibut or a Haddock and the brain of a human.
“Human responses to landscapes also show atavisms, and the Komar and Melamid experiments are a fascinating, if inadvertent, demonstration of this. The lush blue landscape type that the Russian artists discovered is found across the world because it is an innate preference. This preference is not explained just by cultural traditions. Specifically, the suggestion that the pervasive power of the worldwide calendar industry might explain why even Kenyans think Hudson River School when asked about favourite pictures evades a more plausible hypothesis: that calendars – and the picture preferences they reveal in completely independent cultures – tap into innate inclinations. This fundamental attraction to certain types of landscapes is not socially constructed but is present in human nature as an inheritance from the Pleistocene, the 1.6 million years during which modern humans evolved. The calendar industry has not conspired to influence taste but rather caters to preexisting, precalendrical human preferences. The tantalising question is: why is there such a persistent preference for the blue, watery landscape?” (p18, The Art Instinct, Dennis Dutton, 2009)
For an answer read Elaine Morgan.
