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Lois Oppenheim has written an ambitious book that poses several challenges and advances several theses. She states that “the primary impulse of creativity is homeostatic inasmuch as creativity serves to augment self-awareness and it is on awareness of self that homeostasis depends” (p. 6). She broadens the term homeostasis beyond its application to the regulation of blood and tissue fluids to include psychic homeostasis, cultural or social homeostasis, and, most generally, somatopsychic equilibration. Oppenheim argues that “there is a discharge of bodily drive in representation—neuropsychological function is significant (in more than the obvious ways) for both the making and reception of art” (p. 5). She argues that homeostasis is a linchpin in aesthetic theory. As the psychoanalytic model of the mind has broadened to encompass neuroscientific data, she argues that aesthetic theory broadens to integrate the self-awareness of the artist as embedded in a homeostatic matrix. Our idea of aesthetic theory encompasses the spectator who perceives the work of the artist. It strikes us that Oppenheim does not distinguish between art and artist. She assumes that if the artist generates something, then the production is art. Three examples in the second part of the book illustrate her thesis.
We thought the word curious in her title itself wonderful because it allows readers the full range of their imagination. We imagine that the artist is always experimental and exploratory in attitude, curious to see what ensues, so takes the next brushstroke, writes the next line of dialogue, or plays the next chord progression. Sometimes curiosity is expressed with awareness and memory and sometimes through a drunk or depressive episode. Perhaps, as with Klee's scleroderma, a fatal disease that causes the skin and connective tissue to tighten, curiosity expresses a struggle with the progressive change in form and function. Oppenheim uses curious to mean relevant so that she can argue the c