The layer we share

What 1,001 Americans wanted

Between 10 and 21 December 1993, interviewers working for a Boston polling firm, Marttila and Kiley, telephoned 1,001 adults across the forty-eight contiguous states. A typical call took about twenty-four minutes. The questions were not about politics. They asked what kind of painting the person would most like to hang at home: which colors, indoor or outdoor, realistic or not, sharp angles or soft curves, wild animals or tame, famous people or ordinary ones, nude or clothed. The poll was commissioned by two artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, born in Moscow in 1943 and 1945 and living in the United States since 1978, and sponsored by the Nation Institute.

The answers were lopsided. Forty-four percent named blue as their favorite color, against 12 percent for green and 11 percent for red. Eighty-eight percent wanted an outdoor scene and only 5 percent an indoor one; of the outdoor scenes, lakes, rivers, and oceans led with 49 percent, then forests with 19 and open fields with 18. Sixty percent preferred a realistic-looking picture and 30 percent a different-looking one. Sixty-four percent preferred traditional art and 25 percent modern, and 66 percent preferred soft curves to sharp angles. Fifty-one percent wanted wild animals, against 27 for domestic ones. Fifty-six percent wanted historical figures rather than recent ones, and 68 percent wanted people fully clothed, with only 3 percent choosing nude. Seventy-one percent wanted a simple picture over a busy one.

The artists then painted what the numbers asked for. “America’s Most Wanted” is a blue landscape with a lake, trees, wild animals, a group of people with children, and George Washington. For the “Most Unwanted” they built a picture out of what people said they disliked. It is angular and geometric. No artist was named in that part of the poll, so the lecture’s remark that abstract painters such as Barnett Newman were the ones people disliked does not come from this survey. A web version, which the Dia Center for the Arts in New York commissioned and launched on 5 September 1995, came to carry the surveys of other countries; the book Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art (edited by JoAnn Wypijewski) followed in 1997. Melamid’s own summary of the idea was “Truth is a number.” Before you read on, test your sense of the numbers.

Fourteen countries and a caution

The Dia website lists polls in fourteen countries and on the Web: China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Italy, Kenya, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States. The surveys were run by different firms, some by telephone and some face to face, on samples from 500 to 2,462 people, and the questionnaire differed slightly from country to country. In China, television’s polling arm, the CCTV Survey Network, interviewed 2,462 people aged fourteen and over in their homes between 28 May and 5 July 1995. In Kenya a research firm questioned 500 people in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu in April 1995, so the sample was urban.

The lecture says that every country’s favorite picture turned out to be the same landscape. That is the artists’ headline, and it is too strong for the data. Blue and green outdoor scenes with water recur in many countries, and in Kenya blue and green led and 87 percent chose natural settings. But China preferred modern art (36 percent) to traditional (28 percent), and only a third wanted a realistic-looking picture, where in the United States 60 percent did. Nor were the Chinese answers about a favorite person or animal: the lecture’s Lu Xun, water buffalo, and old tree are not in the survey, and the artists chose the figures in each painting themselves, as they chose Washington for the American one.

The method has critics. Respondents were offered fixed choices, so the pictures could only come out as combinations of the options. The Web sample was self-selected and, as Dia itself noted, not representative. And the winning percentages had to be turned into a single canvas by two painters, who made their own choices along the way. The artists said they did not mean to satirize; some viewers, as Dutton reports, read the project as satire anyway.

Home on the grassland?

Why would so many people from so many places want a landscape with water and trees? The popular explanation, which the lecture adopts, is that our ancestors lived on the East African savanna, and we carry a taste for it. The philosopher Denis Dutton took up the poll in The Art Instinct (2009) and made the case again in a TED talk in 2010. Critics replied that the pictures look like calendar art. Arthur Danto is reported to have said so, and Alexander Nehamas, reviewing Dutton, objected that he moved too quickly from possible origins to claims about particular art. In Kenya itself, 91 percent of those who displayed any art had calendar prints, which supports the critics’ explanation: familiar images, widely printed.

The experiments behind the savanna idea are limited. In 1982 Joseph Balling and John Falk showed groups of people slides of five landscape types (rain forest, deciduous forest, coniferous forest, savanna, and desert) and asked which they would like to live in or visit. Children aged eight preferred the savanna. From the middle teens on, people liked their familiar kinds of landscape about as much as the savanna. The authors’ own verdict was “limited support.” In 2010 Falk and Balling found that people in the rain-forest belt of Nigeria chose savanna scenes as the best places to live, and they concluded for an inherited preference that experience and culture reshape. Other studies find that preferences follow what people know. A study of children in Vienna is reported to have found that before puberty they liked simple, savanna-like scenes best, and afterward chose the complex mountain scenes familiar from home.

The savanna story also leans on a picture of human origins that has been revised. The oldest fossils of our own species are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, about 315,000 years old (give or take 34,000), and from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, at least 233,000. The discoverers of the Moroccan fossils concluded that the emergence of Homo sapiens involved the whole African continent, not one corner of it. Even for much older ancestors the habitat is disputed. Ardipithecus, about 4.4 million years old, was first described as living in woodland, and a later analysis argued for tree-and-bush savanna.

The honest summary: people in many places like scenes with water, trees, and open views, and children in some studies lean toward savanna-like scenes. Whether that is an inherited preference or a learned, familiar one is still argued. The claim that polls prove a “genetic memory” of the savanna is a myth.

What babies and the Tsimane’ hear

Music gives the cleanest test of how far a shared layer goes, because its parts can be controlled. A chord that sounds smooth and stable to Western ears is called consonant, and one that sounds rough is dissonant. In 1996 Marcel Zentner and Jerome Kagan reported that four-month-old babies in a Western sample looked toward the sound longer for consonant versions of a tune than for dissonant ones. That looked like biology. In 2016 Josh McDermott and his colleagues took the test to the Tsimane’, an isolated Amazonian people in Bolivia. The Tsimane’ rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. Residents of a Bolivian town were in between, and US listeners showed the strongest preference for consonance. The authors suggested that the preference is shaped by exposure to harmony in music. The Tsimane’ could tell the sounds apart and responded normally to familiar sounds; they just did not rank one above the other. So “babies prefer consonance” and “consonance is a human universal” are two different claims, and only the first has support.

Color tells a similar story. Blue led the favorite-color list in the United States (44 percent), in China (19 percent, with green at 14 and white at 13), and in Kenya, where blue and green led together. In 2010 Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss offered an “ecological valence” account: we like the colors of things we like, so blue goes with clear sky and clean water, and brown with spoiled food, and nothing in the account needs a gene for blue. In 2013 Anna Franklin and her colleagues compared British adults with the Himba, a people of rural Namibia, and found few shared patterns: the Himba showed none of the so-called universal preferences or sex differences. Blue is widely liked but not a human universal.

Faces are the best-studied case, and Course 9 covers them in the context of choosing a partner. In 1990 Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman found that computer averages of faces were rated more attractive than almost all the faces that went into them. Four years later David Perrett and his colleagues found that the average may not be the most attractive: exaggerating the differences of attractive faces made them more attractive still. A review in 2006 found that averageness, symmetry, and masculinity or femininity each predict ratings weakly to moderately, and a 2000 meta-analysis found that people agree about who is attractive, within and across cultures. One study of Scottish and South African raters put agreement across the two at about 0.6. A study of twelve populations in 2014 found that the preference for exaggerated masculinity or femininity appeared only in highly developed environments. The careful summary is that people in many cultures largely agree about which faces are more attractive, and how much of that is biology, and which features carry it, is argued. Why would an average be attractive at all? A part of the answer is plain arithmetic, shown below.

Familiar, with a little new

A second feature of the shared layer is a plain bias toward the familiar. In 1968 the psychologist Robert Zajonc, in the usual account, showed people nonsense words, Chinese-looking characters, and photographs of faces, some many times and some once, and found that the more often they had seen a thing, the more they liked it. A 1989 review by Robert Bornstein is usually summarized as 208 experiments with an average correlation of 0.26, a modest but dependable effect. A 2017 analysis of 268 curves from 81 articles by Montoya and colleagues found that the effect rises and then falls as the repetitions pile up, a curve shaped like an upside-down U, and that the effect held for images but not for sounds. In 2003 James Cutting found that how often an Impressionist painting appeared in library books predicted adults’ preferences for it, though not children’s, and concluded that mere exposure “helps to maintain an artistic canon.”

The same upside-down U lies behind the best-known theory of how much newness we like. Daniel Berlyne (1924–1976) argued in Aesthetics and Psychobiology (1971) that liking peaks at a middle level of novelty or complexity. The evidence is mixed. A 2016 study by Manuela Marin and colleagues, with 206 women rating 96 scenes, 96 cartoons, and 96 paintings, found that complexity and arousal rose together, but complexity had almost no relation to liking and a weak positive one to beauty in paintings. Marin’s results fit the view that beauty, pleasantness, and liking are different judgments. A related result from design research, by Paul Hekkert and his colleagues in 2003, is that typicality and novelty together explain how much people like consumer products, and each suppresses the other. People like a new design as long as it does not stop looking like the kind of thing it is. This is the formula for which the industrial designer Raymond Loewy is credited: “most advanced yet acceptable.” Because typicality is learned within a culture, this finding points to the cultural layer at least as much as to the biological one.

Two pots

The lecture’s other evidence is a pair of painted pots. In 1921 the Swedish geologist and archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960) began digging at the village of Yangshao in Henan, China; the excavation started on 27 October and lasted thirty-six days. It turned up a Stone Age culture with painted pottery, now called Yangshao, and in 1923 Andersson described it in An Early Chinese Culture. The pots, painted with bands, triangles, and spirals, looked to him like the painted pottery of Anau in present-day Turkmenistan and of Tripolye in Ukraine. He concluded that the Yangshao people had come from the west.

Chinese archaeologists, among them Li Ji, Liang Siyong, and Xia Nai, spent the next decades building a sequence of layers and types that showed the Yangshao culture growing in the Yellow River valley, and by 1954 it was reportedly judged more than a thousand years older than Anau. Yangshao painted pottery is now dated to about 5000 to 3000 BC. The lecture tells the story this way: standing before painted pots in Athens, the speaker’s first thought was that they must be Chinese, just as the Swede’s first thought in China was that the pots were Western, and both were wrong, it says, because people share the same aesthetic preferences. The tale is a good one, with two corrections. The painted wares of Neolithic Greece, from the sites of Sesklo and Dimini, are on the mainland near Volos, in Thessaly, and date to about 5300–4500 BC, so “Greek islands” and “3000 to 4000 BC” do not fit. And while the likeness is real at the level of spirals, bands, and triangles, no one has tested whether it comes from a shared taste. Any potter with iron and manganese pigments could invent such patterns, and plenty of painted traditions look nothing alike. The conclusion is plausible, not demonstrated.

How old is a preference?

The lecture says our aesthetic preferences were completed more than 100,000 years ago. That is an inference, not a measurement. Our species is at least 300,000 years old, and the senses it uses to judge beauty are much older. Securely dated objects that look like art are far more recent than the species, though new finds keep pushing the record back. Two pieces of engraved ochre from Blombos Cave in South Africa are about 77,000 years old, and a cross-hatched drawing from the same cave is about 73,000. A painted narrative scene from Leang Karampuang cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, was painted at least 51,200 years ago, according to a 2024 report in Nature.

Charles Darwin, who developed the idea of sexual selection at length in The Descent of Man (24 February 1871), is a surprising witness against a human taste for one body. In chapter 19 he wrote: “It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body.” He allowed that some tastes might in time become inherited, “though there is no evidence in favour of this belief,” and that if so, each race would have its own. His long argument about the peacock’s tail was about females choosing males among birds. He admitted the difficulty in a letter to the American botanist Asa Gray on 3 April 1860: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” It annoyed him because beauty like that was hard to explain by natural selection. Course 9 returns to the peacock.