The Best Art Books 2024

1. Proust Was a Neuroscientist, (Paperback)

An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, New York Times bestselling author Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect. In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first. Taking a group of artists -- a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists -- Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language -- a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. Proust Was a Neuroscientist is the ultimate tale of art trumping science, demonstrating that there's a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, (Paperback) Author: Mariner Books ISBN: 9780547085906 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2023-06-29 Page Count: 256

2. John Sloane's Country Seasons Calendar

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John Sloane paints memories. The subjects of his paintings are farmhouses and buggies, country lanes and churches, barns and bonneted girls, but they're filtered through an artist's lens that fixes them in a distant but familiar time. In this wall calendar, John shares his most recent paintings from the more than 300 he has created. Each one is a reminder of simpler times for those lucky enough to have experienced them and a lovely trip into imagination for the rest. The exquisite detail packed by John Sloane into each of the twelve paintings included in this monthly "John Sloane's Country Seasons 2012 Wall Calendar" inspires nostalgia for times when haystacks dotted fields and autumn meant apples ready to be pressed into cider.

3. Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art, (Paperback)

From Picasso's Cubism and Duchamp's readymades to Warhol's silkscreens and Smithson's earthworks, the art of the twentieth century broke completely with earlier artistic traditions. A basic change in the market for advanced art produced a heightened demand for innovation, and young conceptual innovators - from Picasso and Duchamp to Rauschenberg and Warhol to Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst - responded not only by creating dozens of new forms of art, but also by behaving in ways that would have been incomprehensible to their predecessors. Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art presents the first systematic analysis of the reasons for this discontinuity. David W. Galenson, whose earlier research has changed our understanding of creativity, combines social scientific methods with qualitative analysis to produce a fundamentally new interpretation of modern art that will give readers a far deeper appreciation of the art of the past century, and of today, than is available elsewhere.

Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art, (Paperback) Author: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521129091 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2009-09-14 Page Count: 460