Art

Seeing art online may be as useful as viewing it in real life.  Investigators learned that “Brief online art viewing can significantly reduce negative mood and anxiety. . . . we used a Monet interactive art exhibition from Google Arts and Culture to deepen our understanding of the role of pleasure, meaning, and individual differences in the responsiveness to art. . .

Most of us look at art while hearing something, so Ozger and Choudhury’s study is generally useful.  The research duo report that college students’ moods “were measured via The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT) after a presentation of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings. There were three randomly assigned groups with a narration about the artist's life and the significance of his paintings (group N), classical music (group M) and both (group NM). Participant's art knowledge was also assessed, as determined by the Vienna Art Interest and Art Knowledge Questionnaire (VAIAK).

Brinkman and colleagues enrich our understanding of how culture influences the experience of looking at art.  They found that people from Austria and from Japan moved their eyes differently when looking at European and Japanese art and photographs.

Darda and colleagues probed how culture influences preference for art.  They share that they “we explored Northern American and Indian participants’ aesthetic judgments and preferences for abstract and representational artworks. . . . no evidence was found for an ingroup bias . . . when American abstract artworks were assigned with fictional American, Indian, Chinese, or Turkish artist names. Aesthetic ratings for artworks were similar across Indian and American participants, irrespective of the cultural label they were assigned. . . .

How does how we’re moving or where we're standing while looking at art influence our responses to that art?  Kuhnapfel and colleagues share that “in a gallery-like setting . . . we tracked movements of participants that engaged an abstract artwork. . . . moving more/more dynamically related to more reported insight. . . . We found indications that when people spent more time near to the artwork, or when their mean viewing distance was closer, they rated the art as more meaningful, interesting, and reported feeling more stimulated and insight.

Carbon probed people’s experience of art.  He reports that “When we attend sculptures in museums, they might fascinate us due to the mastery of the material, the inherent dynamics of body language or due to contrapposto or the sheer size of some of these statues such as Michelangelo's David. What is less convincing, however, is the life-alikeness of the face. Actually, most visitors experience dead faces, dead eyes, and static expressions. By merely adding paraphernalia to a face (e.g., a facemask or sunglasses), such unalive sculptures gain vividness and liveliness.

Isaacson and team evaluated how perceptions of paintings are affected by music played as they are viewed. The researchers report that study participants “were asked to choose one of three realistic or abstract paintings, evaluate their perceptual characteristics on five semantic differential rating scales and answer three questions. The participants were then given a choice of three musical pieces (pre-selected to suit each painting) to match their chosen painting. Our findings revealed a significant change in three of the five scales.

Ho and colleagues studied links between culture and preferences for visual art.  They report that their “research investigates the appreciation of visual arts cross-culturally by hypothesizing and testing a cultural-match effect (i.e., people tend to appreciate same-culture artworks more than they appreciate different-culture artworks). . . . naïve viewers from Poland and Hong Kong were presented with 128 visual artworks varying in artwork culture (West vs. East). . . .