Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pleasures of art

2014; Elsevier BV; Volume: 18; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.tics.2014.05.009

1879-307X

Morten L. Kringelbach, Lauren DiPerna,

Empathy and Medical Education

The late English artist Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, is often considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His art consists of uncompromising, mostly naked indoor portraits of men and women in the company of the occasional animal. He demanded absolute compliance from his sitters, who would spend months in often painfully contorted poses in his studio while he would try to capture them on canvas through intense extended cycles of painting, nerves, doubts, and continuous corrections. To the viewer, even those who are willing to pay enormous sums of money for his paintings, Freud's masterpieces are not beautiful in any conventional sense or seemingly conducive to pleasure. Yet, in a new book, the neurologist Anjan Chatterjee of the University of Pennsylvania claims that pleasure is in fact at the heart of ‘how we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art’, an intriguing declaration that demands further scrutiny.