- Hardcover: 236 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford; Ill edition (18 Nov 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0198505191
- ISBN-13: 978-0198505198
- Product Dimensions: 24.9 x 17.4 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 910,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Why do we find it hard to explain why art is beautiful? Perhaps it is because the visual system of the human brain is much more developed than its language centres as it has had far longer--millions of years--to evolve. Semir Zeki believes that we can only reach a better understanding of art as we learn more about the operations of the visual brain.
Zeki demonstrates that the simple act of seeing is a profoundly artistic activity. Separating out the mass of geometrical and spectral information received through the eye to arrive at a visual perception is a complex and creative process.
Zeki traces the functional similarities of the artist and the seeing brain. "Just as the brain searches for constancies and essentials", Zeki writes, "so does art... It is those attributes of vision [to which] the brain has assigned specialised processing systems... that have primacy in art. Among those one can include colour, form, motion, faces, facial expressions and even body language."
Zeki's examples are varied and convincing. For example, he explores the relationship between modern works that have emphasised lines and the reaction of cells in the brain that work on lines of specific orientation. More ambitiously, he even outlines the neurological bases of Fauvism and Cubism!
TS Eliot said that using language to discuss art was "a raid on the inarticulate, with shabby equipment". In Inner Vision that perjorative statement acquires an heroic mantle: no artist worth the name and no-one who enjoys visual beauty can afford to ignore the insights contained in this book. --Simon Ings
Review
"Rigorous and stimulating." -Times Literary Supplement, 11/3/00
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This is not so much a book about art; it is more a book about the brain. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
This is not so much a book about art; it is more a book about the brain. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a fascinating account of the modern facts and concepts of the neurophysiology of vision. The approach via the concepts of artists "vision" to reveal their unexpected "perceptions" of neurophysiology adds an additional dimension to the account. Not a book to be rushed, I learned a tremendous amount about a topic I thought I understood!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
40 of 46 people found the following review helpful
this has little to do with art
30 Mar 2003
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
as someone with a doctorate in psychology who has retired to a life of intensive painting, i can say this book falls short in its fundamental premise: if we can identify a distinct visual capability in the brain, that capability forms the basis for visual esthetic judgments. that argument unfortunately goes nowhere, and the result is a thin book with its substantive content spread even thinner.
zeki's argument is roughly that the mind is an active creator of visual experience; that we create visual experience using a variety of "modular" cerebral functions (specific neighborhoods of the brain that detect edges, analyze movement, perceive color, recognize faces); and that art works which "appeal" to these modular capabilities provide the foundation for art. claims that art that becomes "great" if the mind is presented with ambiguous or multiple interpretations, provoking it to "actively create" varied interpretations from the work in view. in this way zeki hopes to reason his way toward a "neurological esthetics," a biologically based prescription of what is beautiful or compelling art.
well, where to begin ... because a brain function is invoked by a stimulus does not make it interesting or great; my review invokes your language capabilities, but that doesn't make my words poetry. a painting does not succeed by creating a variety of specific but competing interpretations, as zeki claims, but by reframing awareness into a realm where the mundane categorizations necessary for behavior are stretched by the exercise of the senses. what counts as beautiful cannot be determined from the quantitative activity of different brain regions. what counts as beautiful depends heavily on cultural expectations, not on physiology ... on and on the objections roll.
in the end, zeki's argument is highly parochial. his examples come from the "edge detection" art of the supremacists or the cubists; the "color perception" art of the fauves, the "movement perception" art of calder, and so on -- simplistic art for simplistic art theories. (someone should ask, where are the edges in monet or turner, the color in kline or velazquez, the movement in vermeer or van dyck?) on the philosophical side, zeki seems willing to cite plato or hegel as straw men to knock down, but seems completely unaware of the many philosophical or social psychological theorists who could enrich his "active construction" view of visual perception. finally, zeki seems not to have had a personal colloquy with practicing artists, who could disabuse him of his naive reading of western art and its traditions.
psychologists will find this book to be unexpectedly thin on the facts of recent neural research and cognitive function, and lacking in philosophical depth. artists will look at zeki's simplistic reading of art and art history, shrug and wonder, what is this guy talking about?
17 of 23 people found the following review helpful
What studying brain cells can tell us about art
14 Mar 2000
Format:Hardcover
I was deeply fascinated by this book: because it provides compelling evidence that certain aspects of the way we perceive art can be explained by the physiological properties of nerve cells in the visual brain. Zeki illustrates this point most strikingly at examples of modern art. He proposes that many modern artists have unknowingly created visual stimuli that are optimally tailored to the response properties of neurons in specific subregions of the visual processing stream. Zeki's writing is extremely lucid, with a good portion of irony, and excellent illustrations increase the pleasure or reading this book.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Brain, Biology and Bueaty
19 Feb 2006
Format:Hardcover
Neuroscientists have for a long been looking inside the brain to understand its function. Semir Zeki, in this book proposes the unconventional idea of looking into the most beautiful products of brain, visual art of instance, to understand the functioning of brain. Citing examples of Shakesphere and Wagner, he goes further to propose that some artists might be thought of as neurologists, "for they at least did know how to probe the mind of humans with the techniques of language and of music and understood perhaps better than most what it takes to move the mind of human". By showing the striking features of the patients studied by himself and others, he gives compelling evidence that vision is not a singular process and there are parts of brain that are dedicated to various functions such as color, form, motion etc. He writes about patients who have damaged a part of the visual brain (V4) and sees the world in dark shades of grey. Similarly, patients with damage in V5 neither see nor understand motion. They only see discontinuous static images. They for instance cannot see the rising level of a drink in a glass and the drink always overflows. Then he describes a patient with damage to a certain region in cortex, who cannot recognize faces. This person can visualize lines and objects but simply cannot recognize faces. All of these abilities that seem so simple and effortless to all of us normal people -- it's only when something goes wrong we realize how extraordinarily subtle the mechanisms of vision really are and how complexly integrated a process it really is.
For readers who are not familiar with visual arts, this book will give you a condensed idea about different branches of paintings and what the painter was trying to achieve. I found it interesting. The book itself has an aesthetic appeal and the publisher deserves kudos for the page layout and cover design. Although I do not share the degree of skepticism that my fellow reviewer drollere has, I think this book has its own limitations. For instance the cases of these patients have been described elsewhere ranging from Steven Pinkers- How Mind Works to some articles/lectures of VS Ramachandran. The concept of `micro consciousness' raised in this book is ill-defined and misleading and it has to be separated from the core consciousness defined by Antonio Damasio.
For readers who are not familiar with visual arts, this book will give you a condensed idea about different branches of paintings and what the painter was trying to achieve. I found it interesting. The book itself has an aesthetic appeal and the publisher deserves kudos for the page layout and cover design. Although I do not share the degree of skepticism that my fellow reviewer drollere has, I think this book has its own limitations. For instance the cases of these patients have been described elsewhere ranging from Steven Pinkers- How Mind Works to some articles/lectures of VS Ramachandran. The concept of `micro consciousness' raised in this book is ill-defined and misleading and it has to be separated from the core consciousness defined by Antonio Damasio.
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