www.privateairny.com Private Air | Winter 2020/2021
65
W
e are born
to take
pleasure in
looking, just
as we take pleasure in food,
warmth, and companionship.
It's a survival strategy, one
that helps us hone our visual
perception in babyhood and
beyond. Skill in looking let
early humans distinguish
"cues to understandable, safe,
productive, nutritious, or
fertile things in the world,"
as the great psychologist and
writer Steven Pinker puts it.
On the primeval savannah,
survival depended on looking.
More recently, our ability to
look and the pleasure we take
in doing so led to art. Here,
perception is also vital.
Art focuses on visual stimuli,
just as cooking focuses on
flavor. As civilization has gone
on, the recipes have become
more complex, and our palates
are more sophisticated. Liking
the unlikable may be key in
modern art – it marks us as
sophisticated, and you have
Picasso to blame for that –
but we have a predisposition
for the elegant forms of
nature. e visual acumen that
