Here are 100 books that How Art Works fans have personally recommended if you like
How Art Works.
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I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.
Ellen Dissanayake was a primary force in the modern era to bring evolution into the conversation of why we have and often revere art. For her, art promotes social cohesion in small groups and making objects special through ritual lies at the root of making art. If you want to learn about how evolution might have promoted the creation of art, this book is the place to start.
"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world."-Publishers Weekly"Homo Aestheticus offers a wealth of original and critical thinking. It will inform and irritate specialist, student,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.
This book is an excellent example of interdisciplinarity. Gabrielle Starr is a humanist—a literary scholar, by training—who probes neuroscience methods and how brain sciences can contribute to our understanding of aesthetics. She addresses literature, poetry, music, and visual art with ideas informed by experimental neuroaesthetics work.
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.
I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.
Most scientific books on aesthetics focus on universal and generalizable principles. Rhett Diessner also does so in reviewing the psychological and neuroscience of the human experience of beauty. What sets this book apart from many others is that he also considers individual differences and how personality traits affect our aesthetic sensibilities. If you wonder why people vary in their appreciation of beauty, this is a book worth reading.
This book takes the reader on a grand tour of the empirical research concerning the personality trait of appreciation of beauty. It particularly focuses on engagement with natural beauty, engagement with artistic beauty, and engagement with moral beauty. The book addresses philosophers' thoughts about beauty, especially the special emphasis on the intimate relationship between love and beauty; appreciation of beauty from an evolutionary standpoint; and the emerging science of neuroaesthetics. The book concludes with a consideration of beauty and pedagogy/andragogy, as well as methodologies to increase appreciation of beauty.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.
This collection of essays will bring you up-to-date with the neuroscience of aesthetics. Each essay is written by foundational researchers whose empirical work launched the field. The essays are anchored to an original, peer-reviewed paper from the short history of this new and burgeoning discipline. Together, these essays establish the territory and current boundaries of neuroaesthetics and identify its most promising future directions.
Aesthetics has long been the preserve of philosophy, art history, and the creative arts but, more recently, the fields of psychology and neuroscience have entered the discussion, and the field of neuroaesthetics has been born.
In Brain, Beauty, and Art, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume consists of essays from foundational researchers whose empirical work launched the field. Each essay is anchored to an original, peer-reviewed paper from the short history of this new and burgeoning subdiscipline of cognitive…
A part of me is reluctant to recommend books on art. The same part of me is reluctant to write books on art. After all, a work of art should speak for itself. Then I remembered that for most contemporary art shows, a catalog is produced, and that catalog typically features an explanatory essay by some sympathetic scholar or critic. If the art of today requires verbal elaboration, how much more will the art of the past—especially the remote past—require such commentary? These recommendations are a selection of some favorite texts about how art comes into being—and is part of our being.
I pity current practitioners of academic anthropology. Is there any human society today without the smartphone? It is then all the more valuable to read accounts of art-making derived from fieldwork among pre-industrial, pre-tech communities.
Ellen Dissanayake’s work, seasoned by (pre-phone) research experience in Asia, Africa, and Papua New Guinea, argues urgently for art as a common human necessity.
Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art," and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species' four-million-year evolutionary history.
This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from…
As a career coach and artist-advocate, who had a successful career as an artist, I am always on the lookout for books to recommend to clients that offer excellent guidance about facets of developing a career as an artist, including the innerworkings of the artworld. I am very picky! Each book that I recommend contains advice, and/or observations that can help artists make wise career plans and decisions, develop realistic expectations, and soothe anxieties.
As a career coach and artist advocate, I was curious about what the author had to say about the inner workings of the art world. Quite happily, I read an insightful and humorous probe from a writer who sincerely wanted to understand art and its importance.
Bosker is not afraid of naming names when discussing critics, gallery owners, curators, collectors, and artists. She goes undercover, so to speak, and writes about her experiences as a gallery assistant, an artist’s assistant, a museum security guard, and a sales assistant at Art Basel Miami. And to add to her experiences, she tackles the use of the foreign language of “art speak.”
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
A part of me is reluctant to recommend books on art. The same part of me is reluctant to write books on art. After all, a work of art should speak for itself. Then I remembered that for most contemporary art shows, a catalog is produced, and that catalog typically features an explanatory essay by some sympathetic scholar or critic. If the art of today requires verbal elaboration, how much more will the art of the past—especially the remote past—require such commentary? These recommendations are a selection of some favorite texts about how art comes into being—and is part of our being.
In the late 1990s, when I was writing a short history of the Phaidon Press–a pioneer imprint of art books both affordable and beautiful—I used to visit Gombrich at his home in north London. His own career as art historian was entwined with Phaidon’s fortunes. I asked him if it were true that he used to get an adolescent to read his texts to check for clarity of expression.
The legend was exaggerated, of course. But Gombrich’s prose still strikes me as admirably free of academic obfuscation, and this book is filled with lucid discussion of what is happening, perceptually and psychologically, when artists invite viewers into their ‘worlds’.
Considered a great classic by all who seek for a meeting ground between science and the humanities, Art and Illusion examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of present-day theories of visual perception information and learning. Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines many ideas on the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments he ranges over the history of art, noticing particularly the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks, and the visual discoveries of such masters as Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, as well as the…
I’ve had a life-long love affair with the arts. I intended to become an artist, but ultimately became a psychologist researching psychological aspects of the arts. My first book, Invented Worlds, examined the key questions and findings in the psychology of the arts. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, I wrote about gifted child artists. My Arts & Mind Lab at Boston College investigated artistic development in typical and gifted children, habits of mind conferred by arts education, and how we respond to works of art. The walls of my home are covered with framed paintings by young children, often side by side paintings by professional artists.
This is a classic book by German-born psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, in which he lays out the principles underlying our perception and understanding of works of visual art. One of the major principles discussed is the human tendency to see the simplest form possible in any visual array. This ‘simplicity principle’ is also used to explain the intelligence and inventiveness of children’s art. In a brilliant chapter called Growth, Arnheim shows us that children are not striving towards realism; rather they are trying to create the simplest possible recognizable structural equivalent for the object they are representing. The inventiveness with which children reduce complex forms to simple structural equivalents requires far more intelligence than mindless copying.
Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.
I am a working artist and a longtime educator. I have been thinking about what makes an artist, how we choose this path, how we keep going when things get challenging, why we are even drawn to creative pursuits for 30+ years. I do not come from a long line of artists, nor did I have access to any working artists when I was a child. I felt like a fish out of water when I decided that this was going to be my life’s pursuit. There were certain books and people that helped me along the way.
I didn’t love this entire book from cover to cover, but what I did love, I loved deeply. It contemplates what indeed makes an artist an artist, ruminating on a variety of art makers–from Bonnard to Yoko Ono to Bob Ross to Eve Hesse and Sol LeWitt.
LeWitt’s letter to Eve is something that is seared into my brain. There’s profanity in it, so I won’t repeat any of it here, but it struck me to my core; my whole body agreed with his sentiment. Kimmelman is a skilled writer (duh, he was a New York Times art critic), and he manages to tell intimate stories of how things came to be, why we look at things the way we do, why we collect or want things–including lightbulbs.
It validated the idea that artists need to find the thing they are passionate about, trust that, and follow any and everything…
A New York Times bestseller—a dazzling and inspirational survey of how art can be found and appreciated in everyday life
Michael Kimmelman, the prominent New York Times writer and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, is known as a deep and graceful writer across the disciplines of art and music and also as a pianist who understands something about the artist's sensibility from the inside. Readers have come to expect him not only to fill in their knowledge about art but also to inspire them to think about connections between art and the larger world -…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I've been making messes with paint, string, and words, as well as in love, mothering, and in virtually every other way imaginable my whole life. Eventually, an expertise began to grow, and the confusion in my life began to make sense through my creations, while at the same time, the seemingly irrelevant words and textures I was making started to tell me something about my life. Eventually, my lived experience and training in the Expressive Arts Therapies have led me to the roles of teacher, educator, and contemplative artist. If we pay attention to what we express and how we express things, we can find our way through any mess we find ourselves in.
As an anxious mother, I struggled to understand how my creative practice could help me through this trying stage of life.
This book was the first key to help me unlock how my creative practice could support my healing and help me learn more about myself. But most importantly, it gave me permission to proclaim that I couldknow and understand the world through my intimate creative expressions.
Part memoir, part instruction, this book provided the road map for who I am today: a woman who welcomes her suffering into the creative realm and watches it transform into insight.
An expert in art therapy offers this “wonderful” guide “for anyone, artistic or not, who is interested in using art to know more about himself or herself” (Library Journal)
Making art—giving form to the images that arise in our mind's eye, our dreams, and our everyday lives—is a form of spiritual practice through which knowledge of ourselves can ripen into wisdom. This book offers encouragement for everyone to explore art-making in this spirit of self-discovery—plus practical instructions on material, methods, and activities, such as ways to:
• Discover a personal myth or story • Recognize patterns and themes in one's…
