Wes Phillips

Joe Walsh predated that article by, what, 27 years or so when he sang I.L.B.T. Reubens did it," too. Maybe this modern thing for skinny chicks is a possible sign of a post-Darwinian era in aesthetics. Maybe the abstractionist movement is another. Once the survival aesthetic has passed - landscapes that depict a propitious environment and the depiction of potentially fertile mates - we can begin to ""evolve"" to new aesthetics. Perhaps we can invent Maslow's Pyramid of Aesthetics!

That's why I say I'm waiting for the book -- maybe Dutton addresses the examples that seem outside the simple confines of his theory. My friend Frank used toy say that art was what artists did -- to which my response was always," ""So why does some art seem to resonate more than the rest?""If all that Dutton is saying is that surrealism", for instance, has appeal only because it fulfills our desire for novelty, I don't think much of his theorizing.I have a similar problem with Chomskyan linguistics, which don't seem to address the most basic aspect of language I know of, the fact that as soon as we humans acquire it, we begin to make puns. Any theory of [i]anything[/i] that doesn't include play seems pretty poor to me.