In an interview, professor of philosophy of art, Denis Dutton, theorized that our love of art, particularly the tradition of landscape painting, is hard wired into our brain and Psyche. Professor Dutton offers his theory of the ‘Savannah hypothesis’ as follows:
” In the early 1990s a couple of Russian expatriate artists named Komar and Melamid in New York got some money from the Nation Foundation in order to find out what people’s tastes were around the world. So they did some actually serious scientific polling in ten countries (they ended up actually doing more than ten but the original publication list was ten countries) to find out what their favourite subject matter for painting was, what their favourite colour was, if a painting told a story what kind of story they would like it to tell, if they liked abstract art or if they liked representative art and so on. And they did this in the Ukraine, Denmark, France, Holland I think, the US, Kenya, China, Iceland, Turkey…”
What they discovered was :
” the overwhelming favourite of all the other countries which was that they liked landscapes. They like landscapes not only that you would expect from, let’s say, Americans, but they liked landscapes where you had people…let’s say, in Kenya, for example, where they didn’t have the kind of landscapes in question, those were the kind of landscapes they kept choosing. In other words, what everybody in the world seems to like is a kind of standard calendar landscape. And we call it a ‘calendar landscape’ because in fact it exists in calendars across the world.
It includes open spaces with lower mown grasses, thickets of bushes, maybe groupings of trees, copses of trees, the presence of water or water indirectly shown, maybe in the distance, an unimpeded view of the horizon somewhere, the presence of animals, and especially what people seemed to like is some kind of a path. It could be a river bank but often it’s a path or a way which you could take to walk into the distance to go over those last hills to see what’s on the other side. “
Professor Dutton went on to say:
“But there’s another way to look at it and that’s the Savannah Hypothesis. That is to say that the reason that people all over the world gravitate toward this same kind of landscape is that this is the landscape where we evolved, this was the most advantageous landscape for human beings in the Pleistocene, in the savannahs where we came into being as modern human beings, and that’s why you continue to find it. You’d find all sorts of different interests in different kinds of landscapes around the world. But some interesting experiments have been done with children showing that when you take the standard 8-year-old in Europe or Australia or South America or Africa they will tend to choose a landscape which has the savannah features. That is to say it has trees that fork near the ground (that’s interesting; trees that fork near the ground are popular), undulating spaces, open areas where you can hide and where game might hide. It seems to be some kind of an atavism. “
The Most Wanted Paintings, September 5, 1995. A project by Komar + Melamid commissioned by Dia Art Foundation. Courtesy of La Panacée.
Forty-four percent of Americans prefer the color blue. Sixty-four percent like traditional art more than modern. Eighty-eight percent prefer pictures that show outdoor scenes, in which wild animals such as deer are preferable domestic cats by twenty-four percentage points. Humans should be historical figures or ordinary people, depicted fully clothed. (Only three percent of Americans admit to preferring nudes.) And the ideal dimensions of a painting? The size of a dishwasher or a nineteen inch television.
