The truth was that she could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, avove all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called "useful", when she had to give an armchair or some table sivler or a walking stick, she would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own. she would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether this commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to tsupplant it to a certain extent with what was art still, to introduce, as it were, several thicknesses of art: insteead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the fountains of Saint Cloud, or of Vesuvius, she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not epicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of Chartres Cathedral after Corot, of The fountains of Saint Cloud after Hubert Robert, and of Vesuvius after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer had been prevented from reproducitng directly these masterpiecesor beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he resumed his odious position when it came to reprodu int the artist's interpretation. Accordingly, have to recon again with vulgarity, my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further. She would ask Wsann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring when possible old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such for example, as show us a masterpice in a state in which we can no longer see it today. It must be admittted that the results of this method of interpreting the art of making presents were not alsways happy. The idea which i formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than what i should have dreived from ordinary photographs....Swann's Way. Proust AND football. Damn I am complicated.

I have just read Jonah's book, and while delighted to see science and art on the same page, in the same book, there was actually just as much pleasure in the 30 minute video of Jonah presenting at google.

Most of the research he presented on the Neuroscience side I had already read, and this was paralleled with a series of nicely written intro-to-history-of-art/music/literature 101 type texts. Quite readable.

The book I do mean to read, having seen the author talk, is Semir Zeki's Splendours and Miseries of the Brain. Which relates the neural correlates of the creation and appreciation of Arts.

youch. at $61 in hardcover, i better wait for the paperback.

i just blew a half hour or so working backwards through his blog. addictive stuff. not always satisfying - he tends to float teasers and not follow through - but always intriguing.

I really wanted to read this last year after reading the same wired feature, but it turned out that every copy UW has access to was not only out, but reserved for the next round! But you've reminded me to try again.