Dr Denis Laurence Dutton (9 February 1944 – 28 December 2010) was an American philosopher of art, web entrepreneur, and media activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was also a co-founder and co-editor of the websites Arts & Letters Daily, ClimateDebateDaily.com, and cybereditions.com.
Life and career
Denis Dutton was born in Los Angeles, California, United States, on 9 February 1944, as the second of four children of William and Thelma Dutton, who were booksellers and founded what became Dutton's Books, a chain of independent bookstores.
He was a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal.
On 28 December 2010, Dutton died from cancer.
Arts & Letters Daily
Dutton was best known for the web aggregation site Arts & Letters Daily, which he founded in 1998 and which secured him a place among "the most influential media personalities in the world". The site, described as "the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas", features links to articles across the web about literature, art, science, and politics, for which Dutton wrote pithy teasers. which specializes in new and out-of-print copyright works, mostly of a scholarly nature. The editorial board of the company has included other academics such as Frederick Crews, Anthony Grafton and Marjorie Perloff.
Aesthetics
Dutton wrote on authenticity in art and distinguished between nominal authenticity, in which a work of art is correctly attributed to its author rather than being a forgery, and expressive authenticity, where a work is a true expression of an individual's or a society's values and beliefs.
In his book The Art Instinct (2010) Dutton opposes the view that art appreciation is culturally learned, claiming instead that art appreciation stems from evolutionary adaptions made during the Pleistocene. He set out abbreviated versions of his theory in a 2009 Google Talk lecture and a 2010 TED talk.
Dutton also argued that progress in the arts and sciences had declined, especially since around 1800.
Criticism of academic prose
As editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Dutton ran the Bad Writing Contest, which aimed to "expose 'pretentious, swaggering gibberish' passed off as scholarship at leading universities". In 1998, the contest awarded first place to philosopher and University of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a sentence which appeared in the journal diacritics. Butler defended their work against the charges of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of The New York Times. Dutton then ended the contest.
The Bad Writing Contest emerged in an intellectual climate dominated by the fallout from the Sokal affair, in which the alleged opaqueness and obscurity of postmodern writing came in for criticism: Edward Said, for instance, deplored "diminishment and incoherence" in the writings of some of his colleagues and Martha Nussbaum condemned academic writing that was "ponderous and obscure".
Politics and activism
Dutton supported "conservative ideas" and was a member of the Libertarian Party for some years.
He was also a passionate supporter of public radio. In the early 1990s, he founded the lobby group The New Zealand Friends of Public Broadcasting in response to proposals to devolve New Zealand's two non-commercial public radio stations.
In 1995 he was appointed to the board of directors of Radio New Zealand, where he served for seven years. After concluding his term as a director, Dr. Dutton and Dr. John Isles issued a report criticising Radio New Zealand for loss of neutrality in news and current affairs, failure to adhere to charter and opposed to contestable funding of broadcasting.
Bibliography
Dutton's publications include:
References
External links
- Arts & Letters Daily
- Video (and audio) of interview/conversation with Dutton and John Horgan on Bloggingheads.tv
- Current Biography cover story on Dutton
- An interview about Arts & Letters Daily on The Marketplace of Ideas
- An interview about The Art Instinct on The Marketplace of Ideas
- Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty (TED2010)