Book Review: How Do We Look

How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilisation
Mary Beard
Art, psychology

I very much liked Beard's SPQR, with the caveat that she sometimes descended into a kind of erudite waffling--it might have been this way, but on the other hand we should be skeptical, but on the other hand Plutarch says such-and-such, but nonetheless on the other hand . . . How Do We Look contains some germs of an interesting idea, but the caveat has grown to consume the book. 

It's not much of a book, to be honest. It's short. Almost half of it consists of (gorgeous) illustrations. Even within its text, it's divided into two largely disjointed sections: one where Beard considers portraiture (especially sculpture), and another where she considers religious art. The tenuous thread that unites the halves is . . . Um. Well. That's the problem, really. I'm not sure there's a thread even within the sections, much less between them.

I mean, there's something. Beard is trying to write a thought-provoking book about how we, the viewers, respond to art--how our expectations shape our experience of the piece, how the piece communicates to us across time and culture, how the concerns of the artist are or aren't relevant to us. It's got interesting bits: Christians are commanded not to worship graven idols, for example, yet they dress up the Crying Madonna of Macarena like a Barbie doll and parade it through the streets. That says something interesting about the way people project their desires onto an artwork. I'm just not sure what, and Beard doesn't really want to tell me.

The caveat to my caveat is that How Do We Look isn't really a stand-alone work. It's a companion piece to a new BBC TV series, a response to Kenneth Clarke's deservedly famous and influential Civilisation. What works poorly on the page would, I imagine, work better on screen. I don't often recommend viewing over reading, but How Do We Look is an exception.