Critical Review -- Vol.11 No.2 ---- Spring 1997

Donald Kuspit's The Cult of the Avante-Garde Artist traces the therapeutic mission of modern art through its rise and decline into postmodern decadence. The problems Kuspit rightly finds in such artists as Warhol and Koons, however, are endemic to modernism itself: its diagnosis of bourgeois society as sick and in need of cure is fundamentally unsound. The modernist cure is, moreover, worse than the purported disease. What modernists call kitsch is, in many cases, a healthy, tragic view of life. And while modernist metaphysics teaches the need for unmediated sensory experience and the inauthenticity of reproduction and representation, contemporary science shows these ideas to be without foundation.

Donald Kuspit | Midwife of the Future?

Frederick Turner argues in The Culture of Hope that avant-garge attitudes have become obsolete, inhibiting, and altogether blind to the creative possibilities of the future, with its new science and technology and triumphant capitalism. Paradoxically, Turner argues, the cultural future involves a regression to a classical spirit, indeed, to traditional modes of representation and a new religiosity. But Turner has sold avant-garde achivement short, even misrepresented it, however correct his analysis and assessment of its current character. He has also overestimated capitalism and religion, and his paradigm deploys cliches of decadence and renewal in a Manichean struggle. While his hopefulness is admirable, it is tragically inadequate.

Nathan Kogan | Reflections on Aesthetics and Evolution

Experimental research with human infants has demonstrated a level of sensitivity to music comparable to that of musically unsophisticated adults. This evidence points to the biologically hard-wired nature of musical responsivity, and further raises the question of the evolutionary roots of the phenomenon. The question is addressed by examining (1) the ontogenetic and phylogenetic order in which speech and music are acquired, (2) the possible adaptive properties of music and dance, and (3) cognitive evolutionary retrodictions about the period in prehistory when art began. Much uncertainty continues to surround these issues, but there is a strong indication that the performing and visual arts are natural phenomena with distinctively different evolutionary roots.

Jonathan H. Turner | The Evolution of Morality

The neurological rewiring of the mammalian brain to activate a broader array of emotions was the critical breakthrough in the development of not only moral systems, but other features often considered unique to humans, such as the capacity to use language and to think abstractly and rationally. Data from African apes and from ethnographies of hunter-gatherers provide the best clues as to the selection forces operating on the hominid line to produce an increasingly emotional and moral primate, Homo sapiens.

A.R. Maryanski | The Origin of Speech and Its Implications for the Optimal Size of Human Groups

In Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar argues that speech developed from primate vocalizations as a replacement for grooming. Dunbar convincingly shows that language is just a highly developed form of primate communication. But Dunbar's thesis about the relationship betwen speech and optimal group size is problematic: his focus on strong ties leads him to overlook the integrative force of weak-tie networks.

Keith F. Otterbein | The Origins of War

In War Before Civilization, Lawrence H. Keeley argues that prehistoric as well as primitive mankind was more warlike than has been recognized by most scholars. Such scholars subscribe, according to Keeley, to "the myth of the peaceful savage," the subtitle of his book. But Keeley, who leads a long list of Hawks, has replaced this myth with another, the "myth of the warlike savage." Anthropologists who argue that serious warfare arose only after the rise of the state and civilization understate the extent of serious warfare in prehistory. The evidence for warfare among primates, prehistoric mankind, early agriculturists, and primitive peoples suggests that the truth lies somewhere between the myth of the peaceful savage and the myth of the warlike savage.

Alex de Waal | Group Identity, Rationality, and the State

The rational choice approach to the understanding of group identity and conflict tends to overlook the extent to which groups are mutable, and the element of design by group leaders (especially those wielding state power) in the definition of group identity and the shaping of rationality. The 1994 genocide of Rwandese Tutsis was the outcome of an extreme case of planning ethnic and idealogical engineering. To see such phenomena as instances of "rational self-interest" stretches that concept beyond its breaking point.

Dennis Wrong | Cultural Relativism as Ideology

The concept of culture was originally an expression of German nationalism, which reacted to the French Enlightenment by asserting the uniquness and incomparablity of all cultures as historical creations. This understanding of cultural diversity, which prevailed in American anthropology, is widely understood to imply the moral equality of all cultures. Yet its relativism originally applied to different individuals socialized in the values of their culture, rather than to different cultures. The debate over multiculturalism , which presupposes cultural relativism, ignores this distinction. The vogue of multiculturism reflects the decline of the Left, quests for community and identity, and an actual reduction in diversity more than a genuine appreciation of different cultures.

David L. Prychitko | Marx, Postmodernism, and Self-Managment: Reply to Abell

Peter Abell's review of Marxism and Worker's Self-Management misses the mark. Contrary to Abell's assertions, by book neither champions a postmodern case for self-management, nor does it try to salvage a socialist case for self-management by focusing on Marx's humanism. Self-managed forms require markets. It may be interesting to ask if that saves Marx, or if that also requires postmodernity, but these were not the concerns or arguments of the book.

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