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Abstract
One point that definitions of art experience disagree about is whether this kind of experience is qualitatively different from experiences relating to ordinary objects and everyday contexts. Here, we follow an ecological approach that assumes art experience has its own specific quality, which is, not least, determined by typical contexts of art presentation. Practically, we systematically observe typical phenomena of experiencing art in ecologically valid or real-world settings such as museum contexts. Based on evidence gained in this manner, we emulate and implement essential properties of ecological contexts (e.g., free choice of viewing distance and time, large scale of artworks, and exhibition-like context) in controlled laboratory experiments. We found, for instance, that for large-scale paintings by Pollock and Rothko, preferred viewing distances as well as distances inducing the most intense art experiences – including Aesthetic Aha insights – were much larger than typical viewing distances realized in laboratory studies. Following Carbon’s (2019) terminology of measurement strategies of art experience, the combined use of “Path #1” (real-world context) and “Path #2” (mildly controlled, still ecologically valid settings and contexts) enables us to understand and investigate much closer what is really happening when people experience art.
Highlights
Most empirical research on aesthetics and most research on art experience are conducted in the context of experimental laboratories
We were mainly interested in gaining insight into three aspects: (1) how viewing distance changes the aesthetic experience of large-scale artworks, (2) how Aesthetic Aha insights modulate the aesthetic experience, and (3) how liking of an artwork can best be predicted by other qualities of aesthetic experience
For an initial inspection of the data, we examined the mean values of aesthetic experience and the mean percentage of having experienced an Aesthetic Aha insight (Muth and Carbon, 2013)
Summary
Most empirical research on aesthetics and most research on art experience are conducted in the context of experimental laboratories. The essential differences between typical experimental laboratory and ecological settings are manifold. In the field of art experience, it is quite evident that there are substantial differences in approaching, perceiving, and processing artworks in ecological contexts versus laboratory contexts. One research group claims that their studies do not show an essential difference between the experience of art in the museum versus the laboratory (Brieber et al, 2015a), but they present results that indicate influences on valuation and memory (Brieber et al, 2015b). One reason for differences in the experience of art in different contexts could be related to the sample rather than the context itself: Often, museum visitors recruit from specific social groups (Hanquinet, 2013) that are not typically represented by participants attending a laboratory experiment, so studies researching context effects using a between-participants design might be biased in this respect (see Muth et al, 2017)
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