Explores questions relating to the nature of representation in art. It asks how we recognize likeness in caricatures or portraits, for instance, and presents the conflicting arguments and opinions of an art historian, a psychologist and a philosopher.

A complex and fascinating question is why do humans have such strong emotional reactions and human connections to art? Why do viewers become scared, even haunted for days, by a movie monster they know doesn't exist? Why do humans become enthralled by distorted figures and scenes that aren't realistic? Why do viewers have emotional attachments to comic book characters? The answer lies in that, while humans know art is human made artifice, they view and decipher art using the same often nonconscious methods that they use to view and decipher reality. Looking at how we perceive reality shows us how we perceive art, and looking at how we perceive art helps show us how we perceive reality. Written by the prominent art historian and philosopher Cycleback, this book is a concise introduction to understanding art perception, covering key psychological, cognitive science, physiological and philosophical concepts.

This book looks at a refined selection of drawings by Alberto Giacometti and examines them against the background provided by more than one hundred letters exchanged between Giacometti and his parents, the majority of which have not previously been published. The choice of drawings and the selected correspondence illuminate important aspects of the development of Giacometti's work over five decades of his life. Furthermore, Patrick de Vries examines Alberto Giacometti's friendships with important contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Gruber, Balthus, and Tal-Coat, and discloses the artists' views of each other, as well as links and dissimilarities in their work. Discussions with Giacometti's friend, the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, reveal interesting insights into the, rarely discussed, subject of Giacometti's fascination with East Asian Art.

Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In one common form of synesthesia for instance letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. 00'Layers of Reality' is both a personal and a semi-scientific research into synesthesia. Anna Püschel, a synesthete herself, experiences colours when looking at images. With this research she questions her conception of reality. Using a large database of images she investigates the origin, consistency and subjectivity of her synesthesia, in an attempt to answer the question: "Am I mad?"

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

How space – mental, emotional, visual – is implicated in our constructions of reality and our art is the focus of this set of innovative essays. For the first time art theorists and historians, visual artists, literary critics and philosophers have come together to assay the problem of space both within conventional discipline boundaries and across them. What emerges is a stimulating discussion of the problem of embodied space and situated consciousness that will be of interest to the general reader as well as specialists working in the fields of art history and art practice, literature, philosophy and education.