Seeing the Mind Behind the Art

Abstract

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., "artist," "child") that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups' judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists' intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.

Whose Mind Matters More—The Agent or the Artist? An Investigation of Ethical and Aesthetic Evaluations

“…Theory of mind, the capacity for reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions, is a key cognitive process across a number of contexts, including moral judgment [1]]–[[3] and artistic evaluation [4]]–[[6]. People consider the harmful or helpful intentions of their social partners and not simply the outcomes of their actions [2].…”

“…Similarly, when evaluating a work of art, people consider the artist's mental state, i.e. what the artist planned or intended [7]]–[[9], [6]. Here, we compare the role of mental states in people's moral judgments of agents versus artistic judgments of artwork.…”

“…Recent evidence suggests that people are even more likely to consider the artist's identity when they are instructed to deliver a judgment of the objective value or quality of the art versus a judgment of their own subjective preference or liking of the art [6]. In particular, participants viewed paired images in which one image was created by a professional artist and the other image by a child, chimpanzee, or elephant.…”

“…When participants were asked for a subjective judgment, i.e. what they “liked”, they delivered a more subjective response (based on their own taste); participants also focused less on the process of creation and more on the end product [6]. By contrast, when asked for an objective judgment, i.e.…”

Perceiving emotion in non-social targets: The effect of trait empathy on emotional contagion through art

“…The psychological literature on aesthetics and art has emphasized the importance of empathy and perspective taking—speculating about the artist’s mind, intentions and plans—for art appreciation (Bloom 2004; Hawley-Dolan and Winner 2011; Newman and Bloom 2012). Both experimentally induced and dispositional empathy have been shown to facilitate the perception of artists’ expressive intentions in music and dance (Sevdalis and Keller 2011; Wöllner 2012).…”