The Primacy of Vision and the Pictorial Unconscious

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Paul Crowther The Primacy of Vision and the Pictorial Unconscious Why is vision is so important to us, and how does the making of pictures intervene upon and transform visual appearance? The answers to these questions are both elusive and important. They centre on cognitive structures concealed within the picture’s specific informational and/ /or persuasive functions. These structures are, in effect, a pictorial unconscious that engages the aesthetic imagination. To show this, Part One discusses the importance of vision (in re- lation to the other senses) and Part Two explains how the making of pictures intervenes upon, and transforms vision. Paul Crowther is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His previous posts include Reader in Aesthetics and the History of Art at the University of Oxford. He has published many books and papers, including What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture (Routledge, 2017), How Pictures Com- plete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine (Stan- ford University Press, 2016), Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn (Bloomsbury, 2013); The Phe- nomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style (Continuum, 2012); Phenomenology of the Visual Arts – Even the Frame (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford University Press, 2007). Professor Crowther is also an art collector, and the author of the monograph-length catalogue Awakening Beauty:The Crowther/Oblak Collection of Victorian Art, (National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana, 2014). E-mail: [email protected]. .

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