Look Me in the Eye

Julian Bell: Art and the Brain, 8 October 2009

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness 
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 4051 8557 8
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Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki 
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008, 978 0 300 12677 8
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Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images 
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008, 978 0 226 77052 9
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... thanks to superior literary artists such as Bryson, Gombrich and Baxandall, not to mention T.J. Clark, the leading proponent of the social-historical approach to art studies that Stafford specifically deplores. Yet in conception, Echo Objects is easily the most exciting demonstration yet of how a neuroaesthetics might shape up. Crucially, this is a ...
... of survival was if the Eton-City-News International ‘nation’ ceased to call the shots. T.J. Clark But​ why should the rest of us care? There are some 5.3 million Scots, barely a ripple among the total citizenry of the globe, and less than a tenth even of the population of the UK (which is itself part of the problem). Even so, the referendum possesses ...

Zip it

Hal Foster: Barnett Newman’s Anarchism, 5 February 2026

Barnett Newman: Here 
by Amy Newman.
Princeton, 693 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 24918 6
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... 1994 titled ‘In Defence of Abstract Expressionism’, a defence that is also a critique, T.J. Clark acknowledges the allure of this subjecthood but notes that it is petit bourgeois in aspiration, that Abstract Expressionism offers us an image of liberal individualism that advanced capitalism has already undone, ‘a last gasp of oxygen as the plane goes ...

Abolish everything!

Andrew Hussey: Situationist International, 2 September 1999

The Situationist City 
by Simon Sadler.
MIT, 248 pp., £24.95, March 1998, 0 262 19392 2
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... accurate and well documented account of Situationist practice has an important precedent in T.J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Clark, briefly a member of the English section of the Situationist International in the late Sixties, argues in strict Situationist terms that ...