Denis Dutton was an American-born philosopher of art, web entrepreneur, and media commentator best known as the founder and editor of the influential website Arts & Letters Daily and as the author of the book The Art Instinct.

Basic bio

  • Denis Laurence Dutton was born on 9 February 1944 in Los Angeles, California.
  • He became a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he specialized in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
  • Dutton died on 28 December 2010 at the age of 66.

What he is known for

  • He founded and edited Arts & Letters Daily, an early and highly regarded web aggregator for essays, reviews, and ā€œideas journalism,ā€ launched in 1998.
  • The site became known as one of the first major intellectual link-aggregators, featuring short, witty teasers that pointed readers to longer pieces on literature, art, science, politics, and culture.
  • Because of this work, he was sometimes described as a pioneering ā€œdigital-media guruā€ and one of the more influential media personalities in the world of ideas.

Other projects and roles

  • Dutton co-founded and co-edited several other sites, including ClimateDebateDaily.com and the publishing venture Cybereditions, which focused on scholarly and out-of-print works.
  • He served as editor of the academic journal Philosophy and Literature , where he became well known for the ā€œBad Writing Contestā€ that satirized obscure academic prose.
  • He was also active in New Zealand public broadcasting policy, founding The New Zealand Friends of Public Broadcasting and serving on the board of Radio New Zealand in the 1990s.

His book: The Art Instinct

  • Duttonā€™s most widely known book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution , argues for an evolutionary basis of art and aesthetic preferences, blending philosophy of art with evolutionary psychology.
  • The book positioned him in contemporary debates about whether aesthetic tastes are largely culturally constructed or partly rooted in human evolutionary history.

Why he still matters

  • Arts & Letters Daily helped demonstrate that serious, long-form intellectual content could attract large online audiences, influencing later cultural and ideas-focused web projects.
  • Commentators such as Steven Pinker have praised Dutton as a visionary for recognizing early that the web could be a forum for high-level discussion rather than just commerce or entertainment.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.