Embodying Art: How We See, Think, Feel, and Create

In recent years, neuroscientists have made ambitious attempts to explain artistic processes and spectatorship through brain imaging techniques. But can brain science really unravel the workings of art? Is the brain in fact the site of aesthetic appreciation? Embodying Art 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. Chiara Cappelletto presents close readings of neuroscientific and philosophical scholarship as well as artworks and art criticism, identifying their epistemological premises and theoretical consequences. She critiques neuroaesthetic reductionism and its assumptions about a mind/body divide, arguing that the brain is embodied and embedded in affective, cultural, and historical milieus. Cappelletto considers understandings of the human brain encompassing scientific, philosophical, and visual and performance arts discourses. She examines how neuroaesthetics has constructed its field of study, exploring the ways digital renderings and scientific data have been used to produce the brain as a cultural and visual object. Tracing the intertwined histories of brain science and aesthetic theory, Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artifact.

About the Author :
Chiara Cappelletto is an associate professor in aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan. She is the author or editor of several books and essays in Italian on aesthetics, visual and performing arts, and phenomenology. Samuel Fleck is a translator specializing in French and Italian literary and scholarly texts. He holds a PhD in Italian language and literature from Columbia University.

Review :
Cappelletto'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 Nature Chiara 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 Culture