Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He has said that “‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole.”

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator.

In this conversation: the importance of holistic understanding in art history; postmodernism and theory-driven vs. object-centered criticism; literal-mindedness and abstraction vs. embodied and emotional understanding; power and self-aggrandizement vs. wonder and awe; the power of beauty and the criticism of Dave Hickey; Kandinsky vs. Malevich; AI in art; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and more!