Description
Learning to Look is a wandering journey through the nature of art - and the ways it can transform us, if we let it. Author of Infinite Baseball, Alva Noë, presents a collection of short, stimulating essays that explore how we experience art and what it means to be an "observer." Experiencing art - letting it do its work on us - takes thought, attention, and focus. It requires creation, even from the beholder. And it is in this process of confrontation and reorganization that artworks can lead us to remake ourselves.Ranging far and wide, from Pina Bausch to Robocop, from Bob Dylan to Vermeer, Noë uses encounters with specific artworks to gain entry into a world of fascinating issues - like how philosophy and science are represented in film; what evolutionary biology says about art; or the role of relics, fakes, and copies in our experience of a work. The essays in Learning to Look are short, accessible, and personal. Each one arises out of an art encounter - in a museum, listening to records, or going to a concert. Each essay stands on its own, but taken together, they form an intimate picture of our relationship with art. Carefully articulating the experience of each of these encounters, Noë proposes that, like philosophy, art is a sort of technology for understanding ourselves. Put simply, art is an opportunity for us to enact ourselves anew.
Table of Contents
PrefaceEncounters1 Soup is an anagram of opus2 I am sitting in a room3 40 speakers in a room4 Two left hands5 Rock art6 The power of performance7 Cheap thrills at the Whitney8 Whaling with Turner9 Take my breath away10 Speak, draw, dance11 Beach beasts on the move11 Making the work work13 Irrational man14 RoboCop's philosophers15 Pointing the way to liberation, in Star Trek: Voyager16 An Awkward SynthesisPictures17 The anatomy lesson18 The importance of being dressed19 The art of the brain20 Faces and masks21 The philosophical eye22 The camera and the dance23 Why are 3-D movies so bad?24 The myth of 3-D immersion25 Storying telling and the "uncanny valley"26 Peering into Rembrandt's eyes27 This is no zooArt's Nature28 Coughing and the meaning of art29 Is it okay if art is boring?30 The opportunity of boredom31 Art placebo32 Are works of art relics?33 Reproductions in the age of originality34 Who is Vermeer?35 How to love a fake36 Monuments37 Mind in the natural world: Can physics explain it?Nature's art38 Aesthetic evolution39 Bowie, cheesecake, sex, and the meaning of music40 Dylan's literature41 What's new is old42 The performance art of David Bowie, a remembrance43 All Things Shining44 You say 'tomato'45 What is a fact?46 Streams of memes47 Adele in the goldilocks zone48 Art at the limits of neuroscienceAcknowledgements
