"What philosophy of art needs is an approach that begins by treating art as a field of activities, objects, and experience that appears naturally in human life. We must first try to demarcate an uncontroversial center that gives more curious cases whatever interest they have. I regard this approach as "naturalistic," not in the sense that it is biologically driven (though biology is relevant to it), but because it depends on persistent cross-culturally identified patterns of behavior and discourse: the making, experiencing, and assessing of works of art. Many of the ways art is discussed and experienced can easily move across culture boundaries, and manage a global acceptance without help from academics or theorists. From Lascaux to Bollywood, artists, writers and musicians often have little trouble in achieving cross-cultural aesthetic understanding. The natural center on which such understanding exists is where theory must begin."
Dennis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty Pleasure and Human Evolution
