Featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Perennial Questions
2. Can This Be Art?
II. ART AND EMOTION
3. Wordless Sounds: Hearing Emotion in Music
4. Feeling Like Crying: Emotions in the Music Listener
5. Color and Form: Emotional Connotations of Visual Art
6. Emotions in the Art Museum: Why Don't We Feel Like Crying?
7. Drawn to Pain: The Paradoxical Enjoyment of Negative Emotion in
Art
III. ART AND JUDGMENT
8. Is It Good-Or Just Familiar?
9. Too Easy to Be Good? The Effort Bias
10. Identical! What's Wrong with a Perfect Fake?
11. "But My Kid Could Have Done That!"
IV. WHAT ART DOES - AND DOES NOT - DO FOR US
12. Silver Bullets: Does Art Make Us Smarter?
13. The Lives of Others: Fiction and Empathy
14. Does Making Art Improve Well-Being?
V. MAKING ART
15. Who Makes Art and Why?
VI. CONCLUSION
16. How Art Works
Notes
References
Index
Ellen Winner is Professor of Psychology at Boston College and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She directs the Arts and Mind Lab, which focuses on cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children as well as adults. She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from Division 10 in 2000.
Featured in the New York Times and in the Wall Street Journal
"Ambitious, covering everything from figurative paintings to
abstract expressionism, tonal music, novels, and theatre. This is
an engaging project, and How Art Works is exhilarating in part
because Winner actually has some answers."
-- The New Yorker
"This shift from philosophical analysis to a robust empirical
approach of experiment and observation is the starting point of
this book, which is a fascinating account of social scientists'
investigations of art through interviews, experiments, data
collection, and statistical analysis. Winner touches on a variety
of topics ranging from music and emotion, fiction and empathy, the
Mozart effect, and perfect fakes and forgeries, to Hockney's theory
of optical
aids, effort bias, artistic prodigies, deliberate practice and
talent, and our curious enjoyment of negative emotions. Recommended
for all readers."
--Choice
"In this thoughtful, judicious, and fascinating book, you'll find
our best current answers to all the questions that thinking people
ask about art, including what it is, what makes it great, whether
it is universal, why we make and enjoy it, and whether it is good
for us. How Art Works will be the place to look for knowledge on
how art works for years to come."
--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard
University, and author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment
Now
"Never have the links between the world of the arts and the
sciences of the mind been so
carefully and fruitfully drawn as they are in Winner's new
book."
-- David Olson, University Professor Emeritus, University of
Toronto
"If you read one book on the psychology of art, make it this one.
Ellen Winner gives us a book that celebrates the importance of art
even as she remains grounded in experimental data and avoids
hyperbole. She asks deceptively simple questions. What is art? Why
do we make art? Does art make us better people? The clarity of her
logic and the elegance of her prose as she answers these and other
incisive questions makes this book a delight to read."
--Anjan Chatterjee, MD, FAAN, Elliott Professor of Neurology and
Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, Author of The
Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art
"How Art Works collects and critically examines the aggregate of
much historical theory and modern research on art. It is therefore
worth reading for those who want a sharp and friendly breakdown of
the inner-workings of the human experience of art. Winner's survey
offers a framework to ask reflectively what art is, while leaving
room to consider the question for oneself."
-- Riding the Dragon blog
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