Description
Book SynopsisLearning 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 ContentsPreface Encounters 1 Soup is an anagram of opus 2 I am sitting in a room 3 40 speakers in a room 4 Two left hands 5 Rock art 6 The power of performance 7 Cheap thrills at the Whitney 8 Whaling with Turner 9 Take my breath away 10 Speak, draw, dance 11 Beach beasts on the move 11 Making the work work 13 Irrational man 14 RoboCop's philosophers 15 Pointing the way to liberation, in Star Trek: Voyager 16 An Awkward Synthesis Pictures 17 The anatomy lesson 18 The importance of being dressed 19 The art of the brain 20 Faces and masks 21 The philosophical eye 22 The camera and the dance 23 Why are 3-D movies so bad? 24 The myth of 3-D immersion 25 Storying telling and the
