Paintings and emotion: A nonemotivist reevaluation

Abstract

Arguments are presented that paintings are unable to induce basic psychobiological emotions because they do not powerfully engage with spectators' intimate associative-memory systems. However, it is suggested that art installations containing properties subsumable under the classical concept of the sublime (physical grandeur, rarity, novelty, an association with beauty and with biologically significant outcomes), are capable of producing a memorable, though non-basic, emotional response, aesthetic awe-the peak aesthetic response as defined in Aesthetic Trinity Theory (Konečni, 2005, 2011). A skeptical view is presented of emotivism, defined as a proclivity for excessive insertion of "emotion" into scientific and lay accounts of behavior, especially regarding the arts: The loci in the domain of paintings are specified in which emotion has often been unjustifiably implicated. Psychobiological and contrasting viewpoints on emotion are outlined. Several possible routes from paintings' attributes to viewers' emotions are found to be analytically indefensible and psychologically improbable. Implications for empirical aesthetics are examined.

Emotion in Painting and Art Installations

“…Critiques of excessive claims about some links between music and emotion have been published (Konečni, 2009(Konečni, , 2012a(Konečni, , 2012bZangwill, 2004). The present article is a substantial extension and elaboration of articles published in a general philosophy journal (Konečni, 2013a) and in the proceedings of a recent conference on empirical aesthetics (Konečni, 2014), the common purpose of which is to urge for a reevaluation of the status of emotion in the domain of painting.…”

“…Writing about emotion in the domain of painting has occasionally led some aestheticians, art historians, critics, and artists to psychologically inaccurate (and sometimes "romanticizing") claims. A considered list of the commonly observed loci of "emotion" in painting was presented in previous articles (Konečni, 2013a(Konečni, , 2014. On this list, among other observations, are: The elevation of an occasionally expressed fundamental emotion by a painter to the status of a permanent personality trait (perhaps inherited) that influences artistic output; the idea that physical handicap, mental illness, and alcoholism inexorably drive the artist to a particular painterly expression; the insufficiently justified imputation of causal influence to stressful life events with regard to the type and quality of an artist's work (see Konečni, 2012a, for an analysis of this issue in music composers); and the discovery of "emotions," sometimes numerous ones, within a painting and semiarbitrary efforts to trace them to the artist's personality dispositions, acute life events, and the influence of particular locales or other artists.…”