Consilience
(1998)
The explanation for the rarity of great beauty may be (and I continue to speculate) the behavioral phenomenon known as the supernormal stimulus. Widespread among animal species, it is the preference during communication for signals that exaggerate the norms even if they rarely if ever occur in nature.e.g. Male butterflies who can be more attracted to mechanical replicas
that have the biggest, brightest, and most rapidly moving wingsthan to actual females.
Males [of this species] appear to have evolved to prefer the strongest expression of certain stimuli they encounter, with no upper limit. The phenomenon is widespread in the animal kindgom.Maybe this explains the rarity of great beauty. Or maybe it's a warning to all of us in the animal kingdom that we had better hang onto at least the vestiges of medieval asceticism, by way of which certain upper limits are constructively established. Otherwise we'll end up eating and fucking plastic replicas, and thinking we've done well this way.
(p. 231)
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Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)
[240] "It is well known that, even in so unintellectual a matter as eating and drinking, people soon acquire a preference for synthetic products. Those who are used to tinned Canadian salmon have little use for fresh Scotch salmon, and those who are used to certain types of London beer would be nonplussed by a drink that was actually brewed from malt and hops. It will, on the same principle, be of the utmost interest to see if the repeal of Prohibition in U.S.A. will lessen the taste for 'hooch' or not.
"So it is with canned music. Certain composers, notably Milhaud, make no secret of their preference for the timbres of the tone film. I have heard a woman of some intelligence and musical training actually state that she preferred the magic tone of the oboe over the wireless to the actual sound of it in the concert hall; and I have heard a painter, who prides himself on his modernity, state that the two-dimensional effect of broadcast music was to be preferred because the sound instead of escaping round the hall came straight at you and had 'a frame round it'. These remarks would not be worth quoting were they not typical of a large and increasing class of music-fanciers."
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