Bodies Of Art The Shaping Of Aesthetic Experience

This essay collection explores the crucial connections between aesthetic experience and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. After examining philosophical accounts of embodiment and aesthetic experience, the essays apply somaesthetic theory to the diverse fine arts and the art of living.

A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry. In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, Starr shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape the varieties of aesthetic experience. Starr, a scholar of the humanities and a researcher in the neuroscience of aesthetics, proposes that aesthetic experience relies on a distributed neural architecture--a set of brain areas involved in emotion, perception, imagery, memory, and language. More important, it emerges from networked interactions, intricately connected and coordinated brain systems that together form a flexible architecture enabling us to develop new arts and to see the world around us differently. Focusing on the "sister arts" of poetry, painting, and music, Starr builds and tests a neural model of aesthetic experience valid across all the arts. Asking why works that address different senses using different means seem to produce the same set of feelings, she examines particular works of art in a range of media, including a poem by Keats, a painting by van Gogh, a sculpture by Bernini, and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Starr's innovative, interdisciplinary analysis is true to the complexities of both the physical instantiation of aesthetics and the realities of artistic representation.

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.

Uncovering the Body provides a new perspective on how to experience and think about art and the artistic process. It uses the bodily experience as the source and mode of engaging and experiencing work. Our older ways of thinking about art imply the dualities of mind and body, reason and feeling. Author Ed Levine includes chapters on the following subject matter to explain his innovative philosophy: Bodily thoughts and the intelligent flesh Art and ornithology: artist as migratory bird The artistic process Looking into time Western culture is marked by dualities of mind and body, and of body and spirit, which have found their way into our thinking and understanding of art and the artistic process. Thinking and experiencing through and by means of the body can dissolve these dichotomies and provide an alternative way of engaging and finding meaning in works of art. Uncovering the Body provides an alternative to the postmodern interpretation of art. It offers a point of view that moves beyond the limitations that postmodern thinking imposes on our understanding of art and its methods. By reengaging our bodies, we can establish a new relationship between art and ourselves.

Is art, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? Is art itself universal and recognizable across cultural boundaries? In this provocative, copiously illustrated book, a noted anthropologist deals with such questions by focusing on the way we observe various examples of sculpture, architecture, painting, and crafted articles from many cultural traditions.

Examines the notion of aesthetic experience as well as its value. This title brings together major voices that have directly theorised the concept of aesthetic experience or indirectly worked on topics connected to it.