the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Winfried Menninghaus

Naked Skin and the Evolution of the Visual Arts

This lecture took place on October 26th, 2010 at 7:00pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

The lecture starts out from Darwin’s hypothesis that human nakedness evolved “for ornamental purposes”, i.e. as a distinctive trait driven by sexual choice for “capricious” and costly bodily features. Once the aesthetic preference for removing previously existing hair had been pushed to an advanced level, a complementary process of adding cultural ornaments (body painting, piercing, applying objects of decoration) could evolve as a second layer of aesthetic ornamentation. The lecture suggests that these interacting processes were a major driving force supporting the emergence of the visual arts. Strategies of representing the human body bear numerous traces of the dialectics of denudation and re-covering, of producing a unique patency/ latency tension. It is between these poles that a space of (aesthetic and sexual) “imagination” opens up. 

About Winfried Menninghaus

Winfried Menninghaus is Professor of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He served as Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, Yale University, and Princeton University. His fields of research include classical rhetoric/poetics and philosophical, evolutionary, and empirical aesthetics. His more recent books are on the aesthetics of Disgust (2003), The Promise of Beauty (2003), and Hölderlin (2005).

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.