Dennis Dutton's <i>The Art Instinct</i>
02/12/2009
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Philosopher Dennis Dutton, who runs the universally admired Arts & Letters Daily website that highlights three worthy highbrow articles each day, has an excellent new book out called The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.

Dr. Dutton and I have similar tastes in art (although his are broader and better) — the picture on the cover of his book, Frederick Edwin Church's landscape Heart of the Andes, is hanging (in reproduction, of course) on my living room wall — and rather similar backgrounds. He pointed out to me that I used to shop at his parents' bookstore in North Hollywood when I was a teenager.

I am pleased to see how much my 2005 American Conservative article on golf course architecture (which Dr. Dutton highlighted on his website back then) influenced his new book's first chapter "Landscape and Longing," which you can read here. In an endnote for his first chapter in The Art Instinct, he was kind enough to call my golf course design article "wonderful."

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