Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World

by Alva Noë

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 No�, 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, No� 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, No� 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.

216 pages, Hardcover

Published January 11, 2022

About the author

Alva Noë (born 1964) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.

Reviews

[idusmartiae_ · Rating 3 out of 5]

When she says the "It's new and familiar at the same time" about the Bowie song, it's how I felt everytime she talked about something I saw in class.
Talking about art and "how to look art" is something so personal and at the same time so technical, ngl I did put more attention to some chapters that to others, but I honestly think that that's the point, looking art, and more important understanding art is something so subjective and intimate that even parts of the context of the piece become more important depending on the receptor of it.
It was fine but I got the feeling that the author didn't said everything that she wanted to say.

[Ietrio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another tailor for the emperor, only this one does not have to work for a living, as the tax payers are already supporting his lifestyle.