Starry Eyed

Few people have the courage to follow curiosity and instinct and divert from a well-beaten professional track. Julian Spalding is one of them. His first book, The Poetic Museum (2002), challenged the common view of museums, that 'once established, [they] cannot be changed'. Preceding this remark in the Introduction Spalding asserted that 'museums are not just passive receptacles; they are institutions with a long and complex history, imbued with all sorts of peculiar, ingrown practices, many of which date back hundreds of years'. In his professional life, as an art-gallery curator then director in three of Britain's largest industrial cities, Spalding was an inspiring and infuriating pioneer who tried to show the common ground between cultures by grouping objects so that their internal narratives would be coaxed into the open, and conversations between them and their viewers be induced.

The ultimate effect of this seemed to be an anti-taxonomy, the breaking down of divisions in the received understanding of how artefacts, like language, should be parsed. Generations of curators had laboured to create and maintain an orthodoxy, but Spalding, the Luther of museums, the nailer of bulls, and the terror of the curatorial priesthood, raised his hand and objected. Where taxonomy usefully explained the relativity of naturally-occurring specimens, applied to artefacts it tended to maintain an artificial status quo and to uphold the laws of the Medes and the Persians. These Spalding attacked mercilessly in the pursuit of displays that, while explaining what was what, also created juxtapositions that tended to turn his galleries back into wunderkammer, great big cabinets of curiosities where a whalebone corset might look across at a Rubens landscape, and a folk-art model horse and cart at a twentieth-century swagger portrait.

The Art of Wonder is Spalding's interim testament to ideas that he began to evolve in his curatorial career:

This book looks at the art of the world in a totally fresh way. It maintains that you don't need to know about artistic styles, schools and techniques to begin to enjoy and understand art. All you have to do is to look at the world around you and respond to it emotionally.

Well, that's a big 'all'. It is also misleading. What Spalding is advocating here, that we should look at the world around us and respond to it emotionally, is a recipe for the making of art. Indeed it is the first requirement, as Michelangelo, Turner and Paul Nash told us in their different ways. Responding to the world through the emotions is only one of many routes to the enjoyment and understanding of art. There are many others which one could suggest but not necessarily endorse, such as cool unemotional analysis of colour and form, curatorial stamp-collecting, and the love of money. Nevertheless Spalding's opening assertion is a good premise on which to start what becomes a fascinating journey. The Art of Wonder cuts naturally and emphatically across orthodox art history, and looks at visual creativity from all periods and corners of the earth in sections that encompass common experience.

Spalding's book begins with the stars – 'The Stars in Your Eyes' – and with Van Gogh's self portrait (1888) at the Fogg, Harvard, in which the whites of the artist's eyes are the blue of the sky. 'Seeing is now mechanical, not spiritual', Spalding asserts:

We talk of lenses and light waves, retinas and optic nerves. But these are all recent scientific discoveries . . .We don't regard seeing as an act at all.

To turn seeing from a mechanical response to an emotional act which can be learnt and improved upon is the aim of this book, and illustrates what anyone might reasonably guess (on the evidence) to be Spalding's life-work. The chapter 'When the Earth was Flat' takes us from ethnology, with a description of the San people of southern Africa, 'probably the nearest living relatives of the first modern humans', to the evolution...