Abstract
This paper reconstructs the “Arnheim’s puzzle” over the psychology of art. It is argued that the long-established psychological theories of art do not account properly for the observable variability of art, which provide the phenomena of interest whose psychological factors need to be discovered. The general purpose principles of such theories, the ensuing selective sample of art phenomena, and assumption of conventional properties of aesthetic experience make the predictions and the findings of the theories unrepresentative of art. From the discussion of examples drawn from contemporary visual arts and the presentation of the debate on the emergence of the cognitive capacities of art in paleoanthropology, a construct is presented on the specificity of the cognitive capacities of art and its anchoring to perception, which solves the puzzle and has implications for research and teaching psychology of art.
Highlights
Arnheim [1] submitted that art production and experience are as subject to psychology as any other form of cognition and that the study of mind would need the psychology of art
Arnheim claimed that the psychology of art failed to keep pace with other areas of psychology because the qualitative description of phenomena was disregarded by the quantitative methods of psychology and because there was no direct contact between psychology and art
Notwithstanding, any domain of psychological research could be found in art, the psychology of art was missing the chance of providing aesthetics with sound facts
Summary
Arnheim [1] submitted that art production and experience are as subject to psychology as any other form of cognition and that the study of mind would need the psychology of art. The latter was hardly providing groundbreaking results by comparison to general psychology. Studies in psychology of art often (1) pick one model of a cognitive function among those built in a specific field of research, (2) apply it to a selected class of works, (3) emphasize an overarching characteristic of cognition that (3.1) cuts cross-wise artistic and ordinary cognition or (3.2) is a rather recent construct, like creativity that is an artistic value only since the Avant-Garde, or (4) extend art cognition to aesthetic experience. Vision 2019, 3, 67 though it cannot but refer to theories and evidence from other disciplines? Can one set a standard for presenting the value of alternative theories or contrasting evidence?
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