A little bit like dipping in to a modern day Gombrich albeit through the eyes of Oprah. ".Like going back to college, but in a good way. "Asking the questions that always swirl through your mind when striding around Tate Modern Art as Therapy massages the mind in all the right places."- Vanity Fair on Art De Botton and Armstrong's examination of love is most rewarding."- Royal Academy of Arts
Roams widely through subjects as immense as love, nature, money and politics. This is a really superb book and one all art lovers should add to their shelves."A highly optimistic vision. The book itself is abundantly illustrated with some 37 excellent reproductions to encourage the skills that Armstrong describes throughout his essay. He gives a particularly good, not to say pithy, account of Kant, Schiller and Hegel's aesthetics. Armstrong writes clearly and cleverly about art, architecture and philosophy. If we really look, and spend the time to look that huge galleries packed full of more and more works so hinders, and speeding past wonderful buildings forbids, then art will respond to our gaze and will reveal what it has revealed to the likes of Ruskin, Goethe and Proust.
And if we are to love, and so get the most out of, particular works of art this process of properly looking is what should concern us.
This is somewhat akin to the process of falling in love. What constitutes this skill? Reverie, contemplation (classically broken down into five parts: animadversion, noticing details concursus, seeing relationships between parts hololepsis, seizing the whole as the whole the lingering caress catalepsis, mutal absorption) and investment. Armstrong's argument has a wonderfully egalitarian underpinning-it is not book learning, he argues, that is going to help us get the most out of a particular art work (although contextualising art may add something to our appreciation of it) but rather cultivating the (difficult) skill of looking. John Armstrong's The Intimate Philosophy of Art is much less a philosophy or a critique of particular artworks or a retread through the now familiar course of art history than an invitation to look.
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