Pickford and the Failure of Experimental Esthetics

Abstract

The appearance of a careful and scholarly book by R. W. Pickford on experimental esthetics presents an opportunity to review this century-old discipline and try to decide whether or not it has been worth the effort. Has the approach of the experimental psychologist to art taught us anything? Is it something that the artist and the perceiver of art should know about? The title of the book is Psychology and Visual Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1972, 270 pp., illus., ?4.50). Pickford, Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow, describes experiments going back many years, including a considerable number of his own. There is a large body of research on painting, drawing and sculpture to be considered. (Actually, there is almost as much on music, although it is not treated in this book.) Many persons from many countries have been fascinated by this research, so many that they have founded the International Association of Empirical Esthetics. They believe that the scientific method can be useful to artists and that science and art are not forever separate. Admirable! But the question is whether or not the actual experiments carried out are illuminating. Are they on the right track? What kind of experiments are they and what are the underlying assumptions about esthetic perception ? The experimental study of esthetic perception is a special branch of the experimental study of sense perception, which has the name of psychophysics. Both were founded by Gustav Fechner. In 1860 he wrote a famous book called the Elements of Psychophysics in which he proposed an exact science of the correspondence between physical stimuli and mental sensations and, hence, a solution to the problem of the relation between body and mind. He thought he had discovered an equation: The amount of a sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the measured intensity of the stimulus that aroused it. Fechner's Law and the experiments that have been carried out to test it or modify it and the arguments about it have been the best justification for the claim of psychology to be a true science, if by that is meant one that measures things. If sensations could be measured, mind could be measured! Seventeen years later, in 1876, Fechner published another book, an Introduction to Esthetics, even more ambitious if that is possible, which created the special discipline I am here concerned with. The Centenary of this book will be next year. In simple terms, a psychophysical experiment is one that applies a stimulus to an observer and determines what his sensory experience is. Similarly, one should be able to apply a stimulus or a complex of stimuli to