Abstract
Art is one of life’s great joys, whether it is beautiful, ugly, sublime or shocking. Aesthetic responses to visual art involve sensory, cognitive and visceral processes. Neuroimaging studies have yielded a wealth of information regarding aesthetic appreciation and beauty using visual art as stimuli, but few have considered the effect of expertise on visual and visceral responses. To study the time course of visual, cognitive and emotional processes in response to visual art we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited whilst viewing and rating the visceral affect of three categories of visual art. Two groups, artists and non-artists viewed representational, abstract and indeterminate 20th century art. Early components, particularly the N1, related to attention and effort, and the P2, linked to higher order visual processing, was enhanced for artists when compared to non-artists. This effect was present for all types of art, but further enhanced for abstract art (AA), which was rated as having lowest visceral affect by the non-artists. The later, slow wave processes (500–1000 ms), associated with arousal and sustained attention, also show clear differences between the two groups in response to both type of art and visceral affect. AA increased arousal and sustained attention in artists, whilst it decreased in non-artists. These results suggest that aesthetic response to visual art is affected by both expertise and semantic content.
Highlights
Art can arouse emotions in many different ways
There were no significant differences in the mean rating of affect between Representational art (RA) and Indeterminate art (IA)
Art Expertise: Increased event-related potentials (ERPs) Amplitude in Response to Art In contrast with the findings of Pang et al (2013), our results suggest that rather than expertise being associated with reduced ERP amplitude, it is the converse; greater expertise is associated with increased ERP amplitude
Summary
Great art is as famous for its provocative or shocking content as it is for its beauty and elegance. It has been argued that all various ‘‘isms’’ of modern art seem to be departures from beauty, ‘‘anti-loveliness’’ seems to be more the norm (Collings, 1999). In recent years using words like ‘‘quality’’ or ‘‘beauty’’ about art can be interpreted as amateurish enthusiasm rather than knowledgeable connoisseurship (Meecham and Sheldon, 2005). Whilst they have not disappeared altogether from modern art they are no longer central to the appreciation of art (Collings, 1999)
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