Chapter 8: Sacred Geometries
“A great deal of art”: Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970, 83.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
In the movie these wonders: There is no shortage of human efforts to own and commodify the awe-evoking wonders of life for material gain and status. Two of my favorites are these: For an eye-opening cultural history of how the wealthy commodified and collected marvels of the world, from mysterious species to other cultures’ artifacts, see: Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001. For coverage of how the landscape painting movement of the American sublime is an aesthetic justification of the westward expansion of the United States, and the colonizing and displacement of Indigenous peoples, see: Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
As he tells me this: Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Lexington, KY: Createspace, 2015, 80.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Art allows us: Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970, 83.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
The archaeological record suggests: Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Henshilwood, C. S. “Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa.” Science 295, no. 5558 (2002): 1278–80. For carbon dating evidence tracing cave painting back to over 65,000 years ago, see: Hoffmann, Dirk, et al. “U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art.” Science 359 (2018): 912–15. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap7778.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Today, the passions we feel: Schindler, Ines, Georg Hosoya, Winfried Menninghaus, Ursula Beermann, Valentin Wagner, Michael Eid, and Klaus R. Scherer. “Measuring Aesthetic Emotions: A Review of the Literature and a New Assessment Tool.” PLoS ONE 12, no. 6 (2017): e0178899. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178899.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
The question we take on: Gopnik, Blake. “Aesthetic Science and Artistic Knowledge.” In Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, edited by Art Shimamura and Steve Palmer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Dennis Dutton and my colleague Keith Oatley have referred to this as the paradox of the arts, that they are obviously acts of the imagination but nevertheless evoke emotions that can feel truthful and informative of the most moral issues of our lives.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“quietly revolutionary”: Sutton, Peter C. Pieter de Hooch, 1629–1684. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1998.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Susanne Langer: Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, 374.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Our language-based theories: Nisbett, Richard E., and Timothy D. Wilson. “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231–59. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231. This revelatory article would make the point that our theories and words and concepts often do not map onto the more unconscious, automatic, intuitive ways in which we make sense of the world.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Within the study of the brain: For work on visual art and the brain, see: Kawabata, Hidekai, and Semir Zeki. “Neural Correlates of Beauty.” Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1699–1705. Nadal, Marcos, and Marcus T. Pearce. “The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference: Prospects and Pitfalls for an Emerging Field.” Brain and Cognition 76 (2011): 172–83. Chatterjee, Anjan. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Starr, Gabrielle G. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pelowski, Matthew, Patrick S. Markey, Michael Forster, Gernot Gerger, and Helmut Leder. “Move Me, Astonish Me . . . Delight My Eyes and Brain: The Vienna Integrated Model of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes in Art Perception (VIMAP) and Corresponding Affective, Evaluative, and Neurophysiological Correlates.” Physics of Life Reviews 21 (2017): 80–125.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
the neurochemical signals arrive: Pelowski, Markey, Forster, Gerger, and Leder. “Move Me, Astonish Me . . . Delight My Eyes and Brain.” Starr, Feeling Beauty.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
These champions of small awe: Auden, W. H., and Norman Holmes Pearson. Poets of the English Language. Vol. 4. New York: Viking Press, 1950, 18.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
There are geometries: Beardsley, Monroe C., Susan L. Feagin, and Patrick Maynard. Aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
This first series of photos: Fisher, Rose-Lynn. Bee. New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2010. See also: www.rose-lynnfisher.com.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
more than one thousand photos: Fisher, Rose-Lynn. The Topography of Tears. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2017. For a slideshow of this series, visit https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/slide-show-the-topography-of-tears.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
measures of our body’s physiology: Kreibig, Sylvia D. “Autonomic Nervous System Activity in Emotion: A Review.” Biological Psychology 84 (2010): 394–421.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
This book has: Haeckel, E., O. Briedbach, I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and R. P. Hartmann. Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel. Munich: Prestel, 1998. These scientific illustrations would inspire many movements in visual design, including the Jugendstil and art nouveau movements.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
There is no better guide: Gopnik, Adam. “The Right Man: Who Owns Edmund Burke?” New Yorker, July 22, 2013.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
The book has oddities: This view is obviously naive and must reflect some sort of personal bias of Burke’s. Emotion and olfaction share many common neural pathways, which in part accounts for how powerful, and awe-inspiring, scents can be. Soudry, Y., Cedric Lemogne, D. Malinvaud, S. M. Consoli, and Pierre Bonfils. “Olfactory System and Emotion: Common Substrates.” European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Diseases 128, no. 1 (2011): 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anorl.2010.09.007. Epub January 11, 2011. PMID: 21227767.