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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Notes on making value judgements and empiricism vs universality...
I'm reading neuroscientist Semir Zeki's new book, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain (2009). Zeki is the guy who basically founded neuroaesthetics with his influential 1999 book, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. I'm digging the new one more. He's been engaging seriously with artists and art historians over the past ten yeras and he's refined his theory in a good direction.
As I mentioned in a recent post, one of the problems with neuroaesthetics is the tendency for people to focus too much on the autonomic systems. It makes sense, because the unconscious processes are the ones that can be isolated and studied with the technologies (fMRI and monkey experiments) available to neuroscience. Most neuroscientists make it very clear that their experimental findings do not address the whole picture of human consciousness. But some art folk, like historian John Onians, have been taking up this focus on unconscious brain activity with unbridled enthusiasm and layering it with dubious meanings.
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