Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World

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 Noe, 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, Noe 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, Noe 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.