The psychology behind the appeal of original artwork

Why do we place such value on original works of art? Consider The Disciples at Emmaus - believed to be an original Vermeer, it was held in high esteem and sold in 1937 for £1.8 million. Later exposed as a piece by master forger Van Meegeren, however, and its value plummeted overnight.

You could say that we covet originals because of the value that wider society places on them. But that just pushes the question back - why does anyone value originals in the first place? And why with art so much more than other manufactured items?

In a new study, George Newman and Paul Bloom have tested at least two possible explanations - one is that we value original art work because of the originality of the creative performance that led to it; the other is that we feel an original piece is somehow infused with the unique essence of the artist, much like we cherish mundane items that once belonged to a rock star or other celebrity.

In one of Newman and Bloom's five experiments, 180 participants were asked to estimate the value of two paintings they hadn't seen before, both depicting the same scene (one was Son of a Covered Bridge, the other was A Covered Bridge, both by Jim Rilko). Half the participants were told that two different artists had painted the same scene by coincidence. The other participants were told that one artist had produced one of the paintings, and that another artist had seen it and decided to make a copy. All participants were told that there was only one of each painting in existence.

Participants who thought that two paintings had been produced of the same scene by coincidence tended to rate them as having a similar value. By contrast, participants who thought one painting was a copy of the other, tended to value that second painting especially low, and to value the first version of the scene especially high. This shows how we appreciate the originality of the creative performance behind a painting.

In the final experiment, 256 participants read about either a sculptor or a craftsman and their work creating either a bronze sculpture or a piece of furniture, respectively. For the participants who read about the sculptor, those who heard that the process was very hands-on tended to rate the value of the sculpture much more highly than those who read that the creative process was hands-off (involving machinery). By contrast, this distinction made far less difference to the valuations made by the participants who read about the craftsman's work.

In other words, participants placed more value on the bronze sculpture when they thought the artist had touched it more with his own hands, almost as though infusing it with his essence. This effect was enhanced further for participants who read a version of the vignette in which the sculptor made just one copy of his sculpture.

So when we cherish an original piece of art, it seems we do so partly because we value, not just the end product, but the originality of the performance that created it. Moreover, we believe that the work has a special quality about it because it came from the very hand of a particular artist. Copies and forgeries, no matter how close to the original, fall down on both these counts.

"We hope that the research here will engender interest on the broad topic of art within psychology," the researchers said, "as well as more specific questions regarding the role of authenticity in judgments of value."

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Newman GE, & Bloom P (2012). Art and authenticity: The importance of originals in judgments of value. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 141 (3), 558-69 PMID: 22082113

-Further reading- A brain-imaging paper published last year reported that the same works of art triggered different brain activity depending on whether they were labelled as authentic or as copies.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

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Why you should watch a horror film before going to the art gallery

A proun by El Lissitsky

If you're looking to enhance your experience of abstract art, you may want to consider spending some pre-gallery time watching a horror film. Kendall Eskine and his colleagues Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz have investigated how different emotions, as well as physiological arousal, influence people's sublime experiences whilst viewing abstract art. Their finding is that fear, but not happiness or general arousal, makes art seem more sublime.

Eighty-five participants were allocated to one of five conditions prior to looking at the art work. Some of them watched a 14-second scary video clip; others watched a 14-second happy video clip; some did 30 jumping jack exercises (designed to induce high physiological arousal); some did 15 jumping jacks (low arousal); whilst the remainder acted as controls and simply looked at the art without any preceding activity or intervention. The participants were questioned later and the different conditions had the desired effect - for example, the scary film left the participants in that condition feeling scared, and the happy film left others feeling equally happy.

The art work was four paintings by the Russian abstract artist El Lissitsky, each made up of simple geometric shapes and lines. Each painting was shown for thirty seconds and participants rated their experience of the art in terms of how inspiring it was, stimulating, dull, exciting, moving, boring, uninteresting, rousing/stirring, imposing, and forgetful. These factors were intended to tap into Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime: "that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended ... so entirely filled with its object."

The main result is that participants who'd watched the scary video clip tended to rate the art as more sublime than did participants in all the other conditions. By contrast, ratings given by participants in the other conditions didn't differ from each other. This suggests fear plays a special role in the sublime experience of art. Arousal may have played a lesser part - across conditions, participants' arousal scores correlated with their sublime ratings of the art.

Why should feeling afraid enhance the sublime power of art? "The capacity for a work of art to grab our interest and attention, to remove us from daily life, may stem from its ability to trigger our evolved mechanisms for coping with danger," the researchers said. "Art is not typically described as scary, but it can be surprising, elicit goose bumps, and inspire awe. Like discovering a grand vista in nature, artwork presents new horizons that pose challenges as well as opportunities." They added that future research is needed to explore the aesthetic effects of other emotions and to test emotional effects on different types of art.
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Eskine, K., Kacinik, N., and Prinz, J. (2012). Stirring images: Fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0027200

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

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Babies prefer Picasso

Still life with guitar by Picasso [c. www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net]

Psychologists who study art appreciation have their work cut out. How does one begin to untangle cultural influences from more basic perceptual factors - the cachet from the contours? Well one way is to study babies, because they're obviously too young to know about cultural fads and artistic reputations.

Trix Cacchione and her team at the University of Zurich presented nine-month old babies with paintings by the cubist painter Picasso and the impressionist Monet. Their first aim was to see if the babies could tell the difference between the two painting styles. They did this by continually presenting the babies with different paintings by one of the artists until they grew bored (known as "habituation") and then seeing if the babies treated the sight of a painting by the other artist as somehow different, and therefore more worthy of their attention. The finding here was that babies who'd habituated to Monet were thereafter more attracted to a painting by Picasso, as revealed when new paintings by each artist were presented together side by side. There was clearly something novel about a Picasso painting that they perceived and found stimulating, which led them to look at it more. However, the reverse wasn't true. Babies habituated to Picasso preferred to look at yet another Picasso painting rather than enjoy the greater novelty of a Monet.

Next the researchers checked the babies could distinguish between different paintings by the same artist. They found that babies habituated to one particular Picasso were attracted to a new Picasso more than a repeat. Ditto for Monet - the babies preferred a new Monet to a familiar old one.

So why did the babies prefer to look at yet another Picasso, even after they'd seen loads of them, rather than enjoy the novelty of a Monet? The implication is that the appeal of a Picasso overpowers the novelty of a Monet. There's clearly something about Picasso, but what is it?

Cacchione's team looked at a whole range of factors: Picasso's use of vivid colours, sharp contours, and his use of squares and other figurative elements (Monet pictures, by contrast, are more subtle and realistic). But each time the researchers removed one of these elements, for example by using black and white pictures of the paintings, the babies still preferred Picasso.

The most likely explanation then is that it's something about these elements in combination that appeals to babies. One further factor, which the current study didn't look at, is luminance or "perceived lightness". The researchers said it's possible that babies prefer Picasso because of the greater luminance of his paintings. Crucially, luminance is processed mostly by the dorsal visual stream (the "where pathway"). This would fit with the idea that babies don't yet have a fully developed visual system - in particular the ventral stream (also known as the "what pathway") is immature.

"Many of Monet's paintings have so little luminance contrast that it is impossible to recognise their elements on the basis of dorsal processing," the researchers said. "It is possible that infants preferred paintings by Picasso, because they were easier to process and afforded the most stimulation to their still developing visual system."

A final possibility is that there's something about Monet that babies don't like, rather than there being something particularly appealing about Picasso. Only further studies with more babies and different artists will get to the truth of why there appears to be something about Picasso.
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Cacchione, T., Möhring, W., and Bertin, E. (2011). What is it about Picasso? Infants' categorical and discriminatory abilities in the visual arts. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts DOI: 10.1037/a0024129

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

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Talking about art can alter our appreciation of it

A few months back I was challenged by a friend to explain why I think The Wire is the best TV series ever. Pointing to its critical acclaim wouldn't do - I needed to articulate my own reasons. I soon realised that translating my appreciation into words wasn't a straightforward task. What's more, a new study suggests that any reasons I came up with could well have fed back and influenced my subsequent experience of the programme.

The new research was conducted in relation to paintings, where the challenge of verbalising one's preferences is even trickier than for a TV show. Ayumi Yamada asked half of 129 students to either verbalise their reasons for liking two paintings - one abstract, one representational (Piet Mondrian's Woods near Oele, shown right, and his New York City, respectively) - or to verbalise their reasons for not liking the paintings. The remaining participants acted as controls and just viewed the paintings without saying anything. Afterwards, all the participants had to say which was their favoured painting.

Representational paintings are realistic, with content that can be easily talked about. Abstract art, by contrast, is less grounded in reality and more tricky to talk about.

The results showed that verbalising their responses to the paintings appeared to distort the participants' subsequent preferences. Those participants in the verbalisation condition who'd been challenged to say why they liked the paintings were subsequently biased towards choosing the representational painting as their favourite. By contrast, participants in the verbalisation condition who'd been challenged to articulate their reasons for disliking the paintings were subsequently biased towards choosing the abstract painting as their favourite.

What was going on? Yamada thinks that the apparent ease with which we can verbalise our feelings affects our later judgements. Because participants found it easier to talk about why they liked the representational painting compared with the abstract one, this biased them in favour of the representational painting. Similarly, participants who had to talk about their dislike for the art, found this easier for the representational painting, which subsequently biased them against it.

The finding is consistent with past research showing that attempting to verbalise our feelings can distort our later choices. For example, a prior study showed that participants who attempted to explain their preferences for different jams subsequently showed less agreement with expert ratings than did control participants.

"When lacking access to the exact determinants of their preferences, people with abundant vocabulary [such as when judging representational art] are more likely to generate plausible, yet specious, reasons and still be prevented from appreciating art to its fullest," Yamada said.
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Yamada, A. (2009). Appreciating art verbally: Verbalization can make a work of art be both undeservedly loved and unjustly maligned. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 (5), 1140-1143 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.06.016

Related posts:
It's content first, style later, when it comes to people's perception of art
Alzheimer's patients retain their taste in art

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Do professional movie critics evaluate films the same way as the rest of us?

If you want to know whether you're going to enjoy a movie, the opinion of professional film critics might not be the best place to find out. Jonathan Plucker and colleagues compared the ratings given to films by professional critics, "amateur critics", and undergrad students, and discovered a continuum of overlapping opinion with the experts being the harshest judges, followed by the amateur critics, while the students were the most generous.

A further finding to emerge was that undergrads who'd watched more films tended to provide harsher ratings, but these were still more generous on average than the amateur and professional critics.

Plucker's team said this is one of the first studies to compare expert and lay opinion on films in a systematic way. Their results involved the assessment of 680 films dating from 2001 and 2005, with professional ratings garnered from metacritic.com and amateur critics' ratings taken from www.imdb.com and www.boxofficemojo.com. One hundred and sixty-nine undergrads provided their ratings for comparison.

The researchers said their findings support the idea of "creative gatekeepers" who help society decide what products in a given realm are truly creative. A continuum of film opinion suggests different people might best be served by different gatekeepers. They explained: "a gatekeeper for one person may be a well-known critic, for another, novice critics on the most popular film sites; and for yet another, their next-door neighbour or best friend."
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Plucker, J., Kaufman, J., Temple, J., & Qian, M. (2009). Do experts and novices evaluate movies the same way? Psychology and Marketing, 26 (5), 470-478 DOI: 10.1002/mar.20283

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Covent Garden ballet dancers have been lifting their legs higher and higher

For the last 50 years or more, ballet dancers performing The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden have been raising their legs progressively higher. This trend, identified by Elena Daprati and colleagues, provides a wonderful example of how aesthetic form evolves over time, reflecting a mix of changing audience taste and artistic creativity.

Deprati's team collected photographic and video archive material from performances of a single piece of choreography - the "Rose Adagio" of Act 1 of The Sleeping Beauty - that has been performed in near identical fashion for decades according to strict tradition.

Despite the strict rules, the researchers found that between 1946 and 2004 dancers have been progressively increasing the vertical angle of their leg raises. The dancers' aim appears to have been to increase the vertical line of their whole body, rather than to merely raise their leg as high as possible. If leg height was the aim, then we'd expect to see body position lean outwards to aid leg height, but in fact body position has remained relatively constant.

It's unlikely this trend for steeper leg angles is simply a reflection of dancers becoming more bendy and agile over the years. The same trend was seen even for relatively easy positions in which the leg-raising dancer is supported by a partner.

Moreover, the researchers converted the old and new dance positions into stick men and quadrilateral shapes (by connecting the end point of each limb), and found that 12 non-expert participants consistently showed a preference for the more modern positions.

It's not clear whether this means audience taste has been influenced by the dancers' steeper leg raises (this seems unlikely given the participants were non-expert) or if instead the dancers have aspired to meet audience taste and demand. Most likely, the consistent yet gradual change over time reflects an interaction between artistic innovation and audience aesthetic taste. It would be fascinating to know what an audience from the 1940s would make of the new style. Alas, this is surely impossible to test. Even if participants were recruited who enjoyed ballet in the 1940s, their tastes could well have been influenced over the years.

"At a time of increasing interaction between science and art, our work makes the strong and timely methodological point that artistic culture can be studied scientifically," the researchers said. "Artistic culture, like other human behaviours, is dynamic, measurable, and rooted in human sensory and motor experience."
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Daprati, E., Iosa, M., & Haggard, P. (2009). A Dance to the Music of Time: Aesthetically-Relevant Changes in Body Posture in Performing Art. PLoS ONE, 4 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005023

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It's content first, style later, when it comes to people's perception of art

When you look at a painting, what do you think you process first - the painting's content or its style? According to Dorothee Augustin and colleagues it is the content of a painting that we register first, with dazzling speed - within 10 ms (less than a hundredth of a second) - while processing of a painting's style comes later, from 50ms onwards.

Non-expert student participants were presented with pairs of paintings that differed in either their content, their style or both. Content included trees, flowers, a house or a man. Different styles were represented by one of four artists: Cezanne, Chagall, Kirchner or Van Gogh.

The pairs of paintings were presented for either 10ms, 50ms, 200ms, or 3000ms (3 seconds), and the participants' task was to say how similar the paintings in each pair were to each other.

After just 10 ms exposure, a pair of paintings were rated as more similar to each other if they had identical rather than contrasting content, but style had no bearing at this brief viewing time. This suggests content but not style was already being processed after 10ms exposure.

With 50ms exposure, content exerted an even larger influence on similarity judgments and style also began to play a part. Beyond 50ms, content exerted no more of an influence, suggesting all content information had been extracted by this stage. However, style continued to exert a growing influence beyond 50ms, with paintings matched for style being judged as progressively more similar with increasing viewing times, relative to paintings not matched for style.

The researchers said their results were "astonishing" if you consider that artistic style is presumably reflected in "visual or sensory features including colours, brushwork, and treatment of lines" - features which would appear to correspond to the most basic visual elements of a scene that perceptual theories say are processed first, long before whole object recognition kicks in.

The research also shows that even people without any expertise in art are impacted early on by the artistic style of a painting. "If we consider style the characteristic of art," the researchers concluded, "this characteristic needs some time to unfold - but still, it unfolds quicker than you may think."
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AUGUSTIN, M., LEDER, H., HUTZLER, F., CARBON, C. (2008). Style follows content: On the microgenesis of art perception. Acta Psychologica, 128(1), 127-138. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2007.11.006

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Aesthetic appreciation on the line

Seeking to understand aesthetics from the perspective of brain processes is all the rage these days, and has given birth to the nascent field of neuroaesthetics. Now Valeria Drago and co-workers have shown that people who are able to more accurately bisect a line, also tend to be more emotionally sensitive to paintings.

The researchers tested the ability of 17 right-handed participants to accurately bisect 100mm horizontal lines - that is, to mark the midpoint of the lines. The participants also looked at 10 paintings by the relatively unknown abstract artist Stephen Duren, before indicating how moved they were by each picture.

The more accurate a participant was at the line bisection task, the more moved they tended to be by the pictures. Moreover, when the participants were divided into two groups according to their accuracy at the line task, it was those in the more accurate group who were more emotionally affected by the paintings.

Valeria Drago at University Florida College and her truly international team of colleagues, based in Italy, Argentina, Korea, Japan and New Zealand, said this pattern of findings was consistent with the idea that the right hemisphere of the brain is associated both with attentional skills (underlying accurate line bisection) and the perception of emotion.

"For subjects to obtain the full evocative impact, it might have been important for the viewer to be attentive to the entire painting and this might explain why the [more accurate line bisection group] experienced a greater evocative impact," the researchers said.

A flaw in the study is that participants were asked to rate their emotional response to the paintings by marking a point on a horizontal line from little emotional impact on the left, to high impact on the right - a similar procedure to the line bisection task. However, in the bisection task, the less accurate participants tended to mark the midpoint further to the right than the more accurate participants, so if anything they should have shown a bias towards rating the paintings as more emotionally evocative. "It might be useful for future research to...use verbal ratings of evocative impact," the researchers said.
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DRAGO, V., FINNEY, G., FOSTER, P., AMENGUAL, A., JEONG, Y., MIZUNO, T., CRUCIAN, G., HEILMAN, K. (2008). Spatial-attention and emotional evocation: Line bisection performance and visual art emotional evocation. Brain and Cognition, 66(2), 140-144. DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2007.06.005

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