Learning to Look : Dispatches from the Art World - Alva Noe

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Learning to Look

Dispatches from the Art World

By: Alva Noe

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Hardcover | 5 April 2022

At a Glance

Hardcover
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
13.5 x 18.5 x 2.6

Hardcover

$72.99

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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.

Industry Reviews

"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 "Once again, with this new collection of wide-ranging occasional pieces, Alva Noë, a philosophical boulevardier, bestows upon his readers his capacious albeit lightly held erudition and a veritably contagious capacity for delight, with all of it couched in a writerly style that is, at all times, both lucid and clear." -Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

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