Volume 56, Number 15 · October 8, 2009
Why Art?
By Julian Bell
Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity
by Ben-Ami Scharfstein
University of Chicago Press, 543 pp., $35.00
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
by Denis Dutton
Bloomsbury, 278 pp., $25.00
Here are two books by professors of philosophy—one in Tel Aviv and the other in Christchurch, New Zealand—keen to grapple with the nature of art. Ben-Ami Scharf-stein is a veteran scholar of art and comparative religion: Art Without Borders, published as he turns ninety, surely stands as his aesthetic summation. The middle-aged Denis Dutton is best known as the founder of the Web site Arts & Letters Daily, but The Art Instinct is the first book into which he has committed his energies as a controversialist. Both professors are warmhearted educators, glad to engage their readers on a conversational level rather than to deliver pronouncements ex cathedra, and each is fired by an evident love and reverence for art. But what kind of conviction can they lend to aesthetics? Can they confer on this latecomer among intellectual projects—once memorably denounced by the Australian professor John Passmore in an essay entitled 'The Dreariness of Aesthetics'—some aura of urgency?
Review, 3779 words
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