This is because a work of art is understood not by the mind only, but by the emotions and by the body itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Message about Messages
Saved by Alex Dobrenko
This is because a work of art is understood not by the mind only, but by the emotions and by the body itself.
One could say, as the philosopher John Dewey did, that all art (verbal, visual, auditory, gustatory) is the transformation of the artist’s embodied self-awareness into a sensory form that leads back to another embodied experience, that of the person appreciating the work of art (Dewey, 1934). But that transformation is never perfect, hence the inhe
... See moreAlan Fogel • Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)
An artist has a primal emotion that becomes an original insight that births a work of art. Viewers tap that source code via viewing, as if the feeling that led to the original insight gets broadcast, and people with the right kind of radio can detect the signal. Tune the frequency correctly and the experience is shared experience, transmitted throu
... See moreSteven Kotler • Last Tango in Cyberspace: A Novel
Perhaps transformation into art is one way of dealing with the overstimulation of modern life. Art binds chaotic impressions into form … Perhaps film emerged when it did because it was just the therapy people needed to bind into manageable form the chaos of modern overstimulation.
Christopher Hauke • Visible Mind: Movies, modernity and the unconscious
perception is hardly the passive reception of sensory data that the empiricists believed but is soaked with emotion and guided by the images that flood the psyche.
Tom Cheetham • Imaginal Love
Art is what happens when a human feels feels a powerful emotion or experience and then translates it through an artistic medium to be felt and understood by another human
h/t to Justin Mather in the Substack comments
And the weird thing about it is that I realized then that understanding modern art really was like a religion, inasmuch as it was a practice before it was a dogma: that you could never really get it by understanding the way one picture had changed another, how Cubism had created Expressionism, which created Surrealism, and so on; that it was a prac... See more
Adam Gopnik • Adam Gopnik — Practicing Doubt, Redrawing Faith | The On Being Project
In order to function in the language of art, we must learn to live in it comfortably. The language of art is image, symbol. It is a wordless language even when our very art is to chase it with words. The artist’s language is a sensual one, a language of felt experience. When we work at our art, we dip into the well of our experience and scoop out i
... See more