Donald Brook was an Australian artist, art critic, philosopher, and theorist, whose research and publications centre on the philosophy of art, non-verbal representation and cultural evolution.
10 Facts About Donald Brook
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Donald Brook initiated the Experimental Art Foundation in the 1970s in Adelaide, and was later Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Flinders University in Adelaide.
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Donald Brook was educated on scholarships at Woodhouse Grove School and at the University of Leeds, where he read Electrical Engineering.
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Donald Brook left before graduating with the intention of becoming an artist and was conscripted in the army toward the end of WWII.
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Donald Brook received a Further Education and Training grant in 1949 to study sculpture at the King Edward VII School of Art in the University of Durham.
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Donald Brook initiated theoretical studies in the psychology and philosophy of visual perception and introduced a study of Aboriginal visual culture in a context where European art history had previously dominated.
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Donald Brook abandoned art criticism after leaving Sydney, and published extensively thereafter in journals of informed opinion and more popular media as well as in the academic literature.
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Donald Brook retired from Flinders at the end of 1989 and lived in Cyprus from 1990 to 1992, returning temporarily to a part-time role at the University of Western Australia in Perth, before settling again in Adelaide.
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Donald Brook argues that this perceptually mediated substitutive felicity must have been available to pre-linguistic organisms or language itself could not possibly have evolved.
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Donald Brook embraced Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme as the potent factor in cultural evolution, analogous to the function of the gene in biological evolution.