Abstract
The aim of our research was to investigate the influence of the situational context of presenting contemporary critical artworks (in an art gallery vs in a laboratory setting) and the way in which one is acquainted with contextual information, i.e. a curatorial description (reading it on one’s own vs listening to it vs a lack of curatorial information), on the reception of critical art. All experimental stimuli were exemplars of contemporary art which raise current controversial social and political issues. Non-experts in the field of art were asked to rate their emotional reactions on non-verbal scales and estimate their liking and understanding of the artworks. As predicted, the art gallery context increased both the experience of aesthetic emotions–in terms of valence, arousal, subjective significance, and dominance and aesthetic judgements–in terms of liking. Thus, for critical art (i.e. current artworks which critically address serious, up-to-date issues) the situational context of the gallery increased the aesthetic experience–which is in line with previous studies on the gallery (or museum) effect. Curatorial information increased understanding, so non-experts seem to need interpretative guidance in the reception of critical art. Subjective significance was higher in the reading of curatorial information condition than the listening to curatorial information condition or the control condition (a lack of curatorial information). It seems, therefore, that art non-experts have a better understanding of critical art after being exposed to the curatorial description, but this does not result in an increase in liking and aesthetic emotions. Probably this is because the curatorial description allows one to grasp the difficult, often unpleasant issue addressed by critical art.
Highlights
Artists are increasingly expressing themselves through their work about the problems of the world in which we live
We conducted a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for between-subjects independent variables of the situational context of presentation of the art and the way of providing the contextual information with the dependent variable being the overall number of correct answers in the recognition test
Follow-up comparisons of the interaction effect by post hoc analyses using Bonferroni adjustments revealed that participants who were tested in the gallery condition and read curatorial descriptions on their own remembered more information than both those who were tested in the gallery condition and listened to the curatorial descriptions (p < .001), those who were tested in the laboratory setting and read the curatorial information on their own (p < .001), and those who were tested in the laboratory setting and listened to the curatorial descriptions (p < .001)
Summary
Artists are increasingly expressing themselves through their work about the problems of the world in which we live. They criticise the observed social and political situation or climate changes in the world. We believe that an interesting and important research area in experimental aesthetics is to find out what experiences critical art evokes in society among people who are not art experts. Does viewing pieces of critical art outside the gallery make as strong. The aesthetic experience of critical art depends on the situational context and curatorial information form of a subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential
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