By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, December 2010
In late December 2010, philosophy professor Denis Dutton — founder of the link-curation site Arts & Letters Daily — died in New Zealand at 66. Dutton, who taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, was Los Angeles-born and the brother of the founders of LA’s beloved independent bookstore Dutton’s. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Matthew Fleischer, treated the loss as a substantial one for thoughtful long-form internet discourse — Arts & Letters Daily had been “one of the few bastions of uncompromising intelligent discourse on the web.”
Then
Arts & Letters Daily, which Dutton had founded in 1998, was a deliberately spare front page: three columns of curated links to long-form articles, book reviews, and essays drawn from across the English-language web. It had been one of the more influential early link-curation properties on the internet, and had been acquired by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002, where it continued to operate under Dutton’s editorial direction.
Dutton was LA-born, and the Dutton family had been part of the city’s literary fabric for decades through Dutton’s Books — the Brentwood-and-Beverly Hills-and-North Hollywood-and-Burbank-area independent bookstore chain that Doug and Dave Dutton (his brothers) had operated from the 1980s onward.
His 2009 book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution had advanced an evolutionary-psychology theory of aesthetic experience that had been the subject of substantial scholarly-and-public discussion. His February 2010 TED talk on the philosophy of beauty — illustrated with Andrew Park’s animation work — had been one of the more-shared TED talks of that period.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by Matthew Fleischer — was admiring and substantive. The piece included Dutton’s 2004 contrarian opinion-page assessment of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (“Eat Frodo! Eat him!”) as one example of the cheerful provocateur register he had brought to literary criticism. The piece treated him as one of the genuine intellectual losses of the year.
Now
Arts & Letters Daily has continued to operate at the Chronicle of Higher Education across the years since Dutton’s death. The site has held its three-column-of-curated-links format remarkably consistently across the entire interval — a kind of editorial stability that has become unusual in the post-Twitter, post-Facebook-link-aggregator media ecosystem. Subsequent editors have continued the curation work; the site’s traffic has substantially declined from its 2010-era peak but it remains one of the durable independent link-curation properties on the web.
Dutton’s bookstores closed in 2008-2010 — the Brentwood flagship closed in April 2008, the Beverly Hills and North Hollywood locations in 2010, the Burbank Magazine + Bookshop spinoff continued briefly. The closures were part of the broader LA-region independent-bookstore contraction of the late 2000s, accelerated by the post-2008 recession and the substantial Amazon-and-e-book displacement that was occurring simultaneously. The kind of LA-literary-community infrastructure the Dutton family had built across decades was substantially diminished by the post-2010 contraction.
Denis Dutton’s Art Instinct book has continued to be a recurring reference point in evolutionary-aesthetics literature; the 2010 TED talk has continued to be one of the most-viewed philosophy-of-art TED presentations across the years since.
The 2010 piece reads now as a documented obit of one of the LA-literary-diaspora’s substantive intellectual contributors — Dutton operating from Christchurch but with the LA family-and-cultural roots intact. The post-2010 Dutton’s-bookstore-chain closures, which happened in the same window, removed the LA-side literary infrastructure that had been part of the broader Dutton-family contribution to the city’s reading-culture history.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.