Where Lines Are Drawn

摘要

This past summer three major U.S. art institutions mounted concurrent retrospectives of James Turrell. For decades, his work has forced us to ask questions about perception. Given recent advances in technology, it would be nice if neuroscience could provide more answers. Although many recent reports have trumpeted claimed implications of new findings from brain research, an opposing chorus of doubt is surging back [e.g., (1-3)]. The target of such neuroskepticism has often been the frontier outposts of the discipline, where neuroscience pollinates other fields and spawns new monikers such as neuromarket-ing, neuroeconomics, and neuroaesthetics. At a time when the popularization of using neuroscience to explain everything from love to economics is stirring a backlash, a book about how the brain experiences art could play a critical role in establishing neuroaesthetics as a subject worth taking seriously.