Is Perception of Beauty an Evolutionary Trait?

New York-based artist Marc Latamie began his career in 1970s Paris, where he was a student of the Art History and Visual Art departments at Université Paris 8. After graduating, Marc Latamie pursued his own artistic career, one based on the idea of universalism. Today, his works can be seen in numerous exhibitions and publications.

The artistic movement known as universalism is an extension of the idea of aesthetic universalism. A concept studied by various scholars throughout the years, aesthetic universalism attempts to identify elements that human beings find aesthetically pleasing regardless of their cultural background. Extending beyond artistic taste, aesthetic universalism stems largely from evolutionary psychology and anthropology.

According to the works of many scholars of the topic, certain human tendencies such as enjoyment of foods with fats and carbohydrates are part of evolutionary psychology; those who enjoyed these foods had more offspring than those who did not. Similarly, studies have shown that humans from a wide variety of cultures share preferences in the pictorial content of art, including color and types of landscape. For many, this supports the argument that the perception of beauty, like other evolutionary traits, is universal.