Abstract
Across cultures and throughout recorded history, humans have produced visual art. This raises the question of why people report such an emotional response to artworks and find some works more beautiful or compelling than others. In the current study we investigated the interplay between art expertise, and emotional and preference judgments. Sixty participants (40 novices, 20 art experts) rated a set of 150 abstract artworks and portraits during two occasions: in a laboratory setting and in a museum. Before commencing their second session, half of the art novices received a brief training on stylistic and art historical aspects of abstract art and portraiture. Results showed that art experts rated the artworks higher than novices on aesthetic facets (beauty and wanting), but no group differences were observed on affective evaluations (valence and arousal). The training session made a small effect on ratings of preference compared to the non-trained group of novices. Overall, these findings are consistent with the idea that affective components of art appreciation are less driven by expertise and largely consistent across observers, while more cognitive aspects of aesthetic viewing depend on viewer characteristics such as art expertise.
Highlights
People have created and appreciated visual artworks throughout history and across different cultures
In the present study we investigated the effect of art expertise on art appreciation using both basic emotion judgments and more aesthetic judgments of beauty and liking
The current study investigated the role of art expertise with respect to basic affective judgments and more cognitively modulated evaluations of artworks
Summary
People have created and appreciated visual artworks throughout history and across different cultures. The question of what exactly it is about art that appeals to us remains largely unanswered. Experiencing an artwork is a complex phenomenon, likely involving a number of affective, motivational, and cognitive processes such as pleasure/reward, recognition memory, thinking, and reasoning [1,2]. There is no consensus in the literature on which mechanisms underlie our perception of art or what exactly defines an aesthetic experience. Studies on the perception of art have traditionally explored contemplative appreciation of art such as judgments on the beauty of artworks [3,4,5,6] and to what extent artworks are “liked” or preferred [7,8,9]. Beauty and valence are two different dimensions: imagine a melancholic
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