Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World

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:
Preface 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

About the Author :
Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (2004); Out of Our Heads (2009); Varieties of Presence (2012); and Strange Tools (2015). His latest book is Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (2019). Alva received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has also collaborated creatively with dance artists Deborah Hay, Nicole Peisl, Jess Curtis, Claire Cunningham, Katye Coe, and Charlie Morrissey. Alva is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies.

Review :
"Reading any chapter in Alva Noë's delightful new book is like visiting an exhibition - a play, a concert, a film - with a dear, kind friend who happens to be smarter, more perceptive, more eloquent than you could ever be. Whether Noë is writing about David Bowie's performance art or paintings by Vermeer's daughter, he gets at both the particulars of the work he's discussing and also its philosophical implications - how it sheds light on what it is to be human. Noe is pitching the transformative power of art, but he gets there by selling us on its pleasures." - Blake Gopnik, author of Warhol