Denis Dutton Quotes

#1. The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.

Denis Dutton

#2. Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance.

Denis Dutton

#3. A few years ago, Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let's expand ourselves intellectually.

Denis Dutton

#4. [Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.

Denis Dutton

#5. I have seen journals with good financial backing and editorial support die because they looked so bad nobody wanted to publish them.

Denis Dutton

#6. The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.

Denis Dutton

#7. I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

Denis Dutton

#8. My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles, and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.

Denis Dutton

#9. Why do humans make art? It's how we evolved.

Denis Dutton

#10. It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.

Denis Dutton

#11. I think the idea of the social construction of beauty - this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is - is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there's also a natural response people have to it.

Denis Dutton

#12. Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

Denis Dutton