Vessel and team found that we prefer art that somehow seems relevant to our lives. They learned that “an artwork’s aesthetic appeal depends strongly on self-relevance. . . . [adults] rated aesthetic appeal for . . . artworks was positively predicted by rated self-relevance. . . self-relevance is a key determinant of aesthetic appeal, independent of artistic skill and image features. . . . self-relevance [relates to] the extent to which something relates to a person’s self-schema: their self-perception, past experiences, and personal and social identity. . . This analysis confirms that artworks that related to aspects of an individual’s self-construct, such as specific autobiographical memories and identity, were rated as most appealing. . . . at least for artwork, resonance with one’s lived experience is of central importance for aesthetic appeal.”
Edward Vessel, Laura Pasqualette, Cem Uran, Sarah Koldehoff, Giacomo Bignardi, and Martin Vinck. 2023. “Self-Relevance Predicts the Aesthetic Appeal of Real and Synthetic Artworks Generated via Neural Style Transfer.” Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231188107