(Image: Bloomsbury Press)
DOES art evolve? Clearly the arts, specifically visual arts, undergo progressive changes. Skills develop – whether in the technical sense, as with the progressive mastery of the oil medium in painting from the early Renaissance to the masterpieces of Titian, or in the more perceptually oriented achievements of naturalistic painting from Giotto to Constable.
Particular works, such as the Mona Lisa or Auld Lang Syne, seem to have some built-in survival mechanism that renders them “fittest” to transcend cultural environments and stand the test of time. Are these cultural icons, or “memes” as Richard Dawkins calls them,…
