The Psychology of Art Appreciation

The Psychology of Art Appreciation
Author: Bjarne Sode Funch
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 1997
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9788772894027

This book is more than an introduction to the psychology of art appreciation, it puts into perspective the research carried out within the area and offers a new understanding of the relationship between art and viewer. A number of studies within the psycho-physical, cognitive, psychoanalytic, and existential-phenomenological schools of thought are presented in order to demonstrate how their views on the appreciation of visual art vary. Five different types of art appreciation, ranging from a spontaneous preference for a work of art to a blissful experience of trancendence, are identified and described.

God and Mystery in Words

God and Mystery in Words
Author: David Brown
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2008-03-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191607894

In God and Mystery in Words David Brown uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launch pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Imagery and hymns mattered, liturgial msic encouraged a sense of drama, sermons required rhetoric. In a characteristically stimulatling and inspiringly expansive study, that ranges from ancient Greek drama to modern poetry, from the meaning of the Logos to the history of vestments, David Brown pleads for a much wider focus on the kind of factors that aid experience of God.