Human Cortical Activity Evoked by the Assignment of Authenticity when Viewing Works of Art

Abstract

The expertise of others is a major social influence on our everyday decisions and actions. Many viewers of art, whether expert or naïve, are convinced that the full esthetic appreciation of an artwork depends upon the assurance that the work is genuine rather than fake. Rembrandt portraits provide an interesting image set for testing this idea, as there is a large number of them and recent scholarship has determined that quite a few fakes and copies exist. Use of this image set allowed us to separate the brain’s response to images of genuine and fake pictures from the brain’s response to external advice about the authenticity of the paintings. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, viewing of artworks assigned as “copy,” rather than “authentic,” evoked stronger responses in frontopolar cortex (FPC), and right precuneus, regardless of whether the portrait was actually genuine. Advice about authenticity had no direct effect on the cortical visual areas responsive to the paintings, but there was a significant psycho-physiological interaction between the FPC and the lateral occipital area, which suggests that these visual areas may be modulated by FPC. We propose that the activation of brain networks rather than a single cortical area in this paradigm supports the art scholars’ view that esthetic judgments are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional in nature.

Conservation and authenticity: Interactions and enquiries

“…For example, Huang et al (2001) used functional magnetic resonance imaging of the Figure 1 The important arenas over which authenticity operates as far as works of art themselves are concerned. These are the material authenticity of the original and its possible alterations with time, the aesthetic desire for completed works whose value lies in their visual appreciation, and the conceptual, which relates to the increasingly important function of works of art to exist independently of any physical form or fixed materiality, as in ethnographic and post-modern contexts.…”

The role of the lateral occipital cortex in aesthetic appreciation of representational and abstract paintings: A TMS study

“…Therefore, it seems that LO activity during the viewing of artworks is not strictly related to the extraction of low-level shape/object information: it is also related to the aesthetic appreciation of an image, at least when the image http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2015.01.008 0278-2626/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. is artistic, and hence more naturally fosters an aesthetic orientation (Huang, Bridge, Kemp, & Parker, 2011;Kirk, Skov, Hulme, Christensen, & Zeki, 2009;Noguchi & Murota, 2013).…”

Could linear model bridge the gap between low-level statistical features and aesthetic emotions of visual textures?

“…By recording the brain activity of 10 male and 10 female participants while they were appreciating examples of artistic and natural visual stimuli, Cela-Conde et al explored possible differences between men and women's neural correlates of aesthetic preference [34]. Using fMRI, Huang et al identified that authenticity of arts had no direct effect on the cortical visual areas responsive to the paintings, but there was a significant psycho-physiological interaction between frontopolar cortex and the lateral occipital area [35]. After a conjunction analysis of brain activity of 21 subjects, Ishizu and Zeki found out that only one cortical area located in the medial orbito-frontal cortex was active during the experience of musical and visual beauty [36].…”