In the introductory chapter to his seminal book on evolutionary psychology, How the Mind Works,[1] Steven Pinker writes that the mind is organized into “modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world”; that “the modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic program”; and that “their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history.”[2] Plausible, indeed. “Why do we take pleasure in abstract art: zigzags, plaids, tweeds, polka dots, parallels, circles, squares, stars, and spirals?” he asks in the concluding chapter.[3] According to Pinker, “it cannot be a coincidence that exactly these kinds of motifs have been posited by vision researchers as the features of the world that our perceptual analyzers lock onto as they try to make sense of the surfaces and objects out there.”[4] In other words, the modules or mental organs concerned with vision detect in abstract art the very geometric templates that have taken shape in them over the last hundred-thousand years. By extension, the better the fit between the art and the template, the more pleasing the art. Plausible, again. But how do we explain the fact that—from the outset, starting with cave paintings some thirty-thousand years ago—the motifs associated with abstract art rarely spill out of small, neat rectangular frames? That is, why is the pleasure so localized and so geometrically circumscribed? More important, how do we explain the fact that—from the outset, again—abstract art could not but disappoint and frustrate the posited perceptual analyzers in search of the meaningful surfaces and objects out there? In other words, how could the mind be so misguided as to seek pleasure in its own organs’ devices rather then in their interaction with the world?

Footnotes

1. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1998 (first published in 1997).

2. Op. cit., p. 21.

3. Op. cit., p. 526.

4. Loc. cit.