Description
Book SynopsisChiara Cappelletto recasts the relationship between neuroscience and aesthetics and calls for shifting the focus of inquiry from the brain itself to personal experience in the world.
Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artifact.
Trade ReviewCappelletto’s
Embodying Art marks a new beginning. Skeptics of brain-oriented approaches to art and aesthetics will delight in her trenchant criticisms, even as friends will welcome what is in fact a sympathetic, deeply informed, and highly informative embrace of the emerging field. But whatever side you are on, you will be impressed by her demonstration that neuroaesthetics has become a new arena in which not only scientists of the brain, but also philosophers, art historians, and artists themselves, are reimagining, indeed, remaking what it is to be human. This is a book for anyone interested in why the study of the brain now occupies such a central place in our cultural life. -- Alva Noë, author of
Strange Tools: Art and Human NatureChiara Cappelletto is celebrated for writing the first book on neuroaesthetics to come out of Italy, but what we really should be noticing is her powerful ability to dispense with cultural conventions about aesthetics to perform what is among the most careful sifting and analysis of the literatures, including the persistent literature on the mind-body divide, that have informed the disparate threads of this relatively new field, without forcing them into unitary interdisciplinarity. Cappelletto combines an insistence on the field's early and uneven development with measured skepticism about the discipline’s love of its own metaphors and cultures—what she refers to as the 'intractable problem' of neuroesthetics' 'fictional experimental setting' and its narrow thematization of the embodied mind, bringing us to recognize the value of analyzing lived encounters with art in its historical contexts. If you are looking to stay with the trouble of neuroaesthetics without losing sight of the cultural conventions that produce both art and the brain itself, this is the book to stay with. -- Lisa Cartwright, author of
Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual CultureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Neuroaesthetics Reloaded
1. 1994: Putting Neuroaesthetics on the Map
2. Neuroaesthetics: Cerebral Attributes and Bodily Ghosts
3. Neuroarthistory: On Emotions, Matter, and Time
4. Neuroartcriticism: From the Artist’s Lesions to the Artwork and Vice Versa
5. The Brain’s Iconoclash
6. Brains on Stage
Notes
Bibliography
Appendix: Artworks on the Brain
Index
