Why modern art is all in the mind

This looks cool:

Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been carefully created for them, started to refer to it as “a painting”.

Now that experiment . . . has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art. . . . The book, which is subtitled The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, is not an attack on modern or contemporary art and Bloom says fans of more traditional art are not capable of making purely aesthetic judgments either. “I don’t have a strong position about the art itself,” he said this weekend. “But I do have a strong position about why we actually like it.”

This sounds fascinating. But I’m skeptical about this part:

Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks, he [Paul Bloom, the author of the book described above] argues.

What is it about art that makes people say such silly things? This above sentence is not a direct quote from Bloom, though, so maybe it’s just a misunderstanding coming from Vanessa Thorpe, the author of the above-quoted news article.

There are a few more contradictions floating around here. As noted above, at one point, Thorpe writes:

The book . . . is not an attack on modern or contemporary art and Bloom says fans of more traditional art are not capable of making purely aesthetic judgments either.

But look later on:

“Traditional art is about what is in the world; more modern works are about the very process of representation,” he writes. “An appreciation of much of modern art therefore requires specific expertise. Any dope can marvel at a Rembrandt, but only an elite few can make any sense of a work such as Sherrie Levine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), and so only an elite few are going to enjoy it . . . Any schmoe can buy, and appreciate, a pretty painting. . .”

I wonder if the author of this book (and the author of the news article) have read Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, which tells a story that’s pretty coherent to me. I worry about the circularity of defining modern art as abstract stuff that’s hard to follow. To me this seems to have a lot more to do with the history of the academic/museum art world in the 20th century than with psychological perceptions of art.

I’d really hate to generalize from statements about Jackson Pollock (whose “drip” paintings I, personally, see no merit in whatsoever, but, hey, that’s just me talking here) to claims that “humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks.” I’m hoping to go to Lascaux in August (yeah, I know, they don’t let you into the real Lascaux, but the tour guides say that the fake one nearby is pretty good) so can report back to you then.

In the meantime, the psychology research looks great, and I suppose the author of an academic book can hardly complain if an overwhelmingly positive newspaper article gets a few things wrong. I’m looking forward to reading the book myself, that’s for sure.

12 thoughts on “Why modern art is all in the mind

  1. I found viewing Jackson Pollock's paintings to be comforting, in a way I can't explain, when I was depressed so I think they have some value.

    And I happen to think "modern" or non-representational art turned out to be a giant dead end. When I visit MOMA, it strikes me how the best works in the collection tend to be the earlies chronilogically. So I'm sympathetic to critiques like Wolfe's, I just don't think the stuff was completely valueless.

  2. "Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks"

    People who say things like this should find a grassy spot, lie on their backs, and spend 20 minutes looking at clouds.

    I've been doing this a lot lately (I'm in the middle of a cross-country bike trip) and recommend the practice.

  3. Believe Peirce would agree – as he once put it – "you don't see a rose – you hypothesize that you are seeing one and doubt about this does not arise"

    Any repesentation (model) requires a pre-representation (an earlier less developed "wronger" model) – so representation and perception evolve

    and so those who have focused on artistic representation will likley have more developed respresentions/perceptions

    K?

  4. "Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks."
    I can read the "just" in this sentence two ways:
    1. There is nothing about the actual objective features of art that makes anything more pleasing than anything else. Aesthetic pleasure is entirely an arbitrary social invention.
    2. There are certain intrinsic features of art that make some images more pleasing than others. However, the process of apprehending art also always involves so many other factors that we never have a "pure" response to those objective features; whatever primal aesthetic appreciation we might have is always filtered through other things, including the social context in which we are viewing the art, and things we have been told or learned (within a historical and cultural context) about what makes for good and bad art.
    It seems like you're reacting to #1, which I also think is ridiculous. And the headline of the article, with its use of the phrase "all in the mind" evokes #1.
    On the other hand, the article also says "According to Bloom, someone who invests heavily in abstract art and explains that they simply love the shapes and colours is only telling half the story." If he's allowing it to be half the story, that's more evocative of #2. That seems like a more reasonable position to take.

  5. Sanjay: Interesting idea. Maybe I was just primed to expect to read something stupid about art, having seen such things before (follow the "such silly things") link above. I have the utmost respect for the researchers on the original study.

  6. It costs $475 dollars to play 18 holes of golf at the very large art object called the Pebble Beach Golf Links, so I suspect people do get a variety of pleasure out of interacting in various ways with beautiful things.

  7. I find that a lot of constructivist arguments devolve into this sort of confusion, and the fault is just as often on the proponents' side. It's like it's not enough to say that something involves social interpretations and shared meanings; some proponents feel like they have to puff up their position by going the extra step and say that it's nothing-but. That's been a real problem in psychology, where potentially useful ideas have collapsed into statements like "there's no such thing as personality" (really). Alan Sokal's Social Text prank is a good example of how this line of thinking can get taken seriously even when it's obviously wrong.
    "I have the utmost respect for the researchers on the original study."
    I am sure at least one of them would be glad to hear it.

  8. > carefully created for them, started to refer to it as "a painting".

    i.e. displayed correct use of English, since *if* the splodges had been carefully created for them, "painting" would be the correct way to refer to the work, no matter their feelings about it.

    This bit doesn't really reveal anything interesting other than that three year olds grasp language and are capable of accepting a premise they are presented with.

  9. Steve: My appreciation for golf is about at the level of my appreciation for Jackson Pollock, so I'm not the best person to respond to this one. That said, the $475-for-a-round-at-Pebble-Beach seems more like an example of people willing to pay for anticipated peak experiences (sort of like paying $250 for seats at an Eagles concert). This is not meant as a disparagement of golfers (or Eagles fans); I just think it's a different psychological category from that of direct aesthetic apprecation.

    Efrique: Yes, but there are a lot of subtleties within the concepts of "grasp language and are capable of accepting a premise." Kids (and, for that matter, adults) are more willing to accept some sort of premise than others.

  10. One of my all-time favorite art quotes is from "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robernt Heinlein: "What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience."

  11. "art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce – render emotional – his audience, each time"(Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein)

  12. I think if one finds the best works to be the old ones, it's not the modern artists' problem. Art is a give and take between the viewer and the artist– as a viewer, you have got to meet the artist halfway. It's impossible to do that for every artist, and for every painting, and it doesn't mean that you necessarily need to like every modern work, but to understand the intention behind it, and the purpose, is so, so important, otherwise you are essentially casting art as worthless except for its appearance alone. Imagine going to an art school and telling students that's how you felt about it– you would be laughed at, and they'd probably be offended you thought so lowly of what they were pursuing. Not that you'd be a minority.

    The quote about modern artists is very stupid, albeit appealing. Indeed, the process of making art is very sexual (my art teacher once said to a friend of mine, "You put too much paint down too early. You have to do it more sexy, it looks like you blew your load too early"), or it can be violent, or a variety of other things. It can be pretentious, yes, and I've seen a ton of pretentious art. But art isn't always emotion. Sometimes the artist is making a statement, sometimes the artist is asking a question (I have yet to understand this better). Sometimes artists just do things because they can get away with it. You can't sum it up in a quote that is, ironically, quite pretentious to use right off the bat. You really have to weight different paintings in context.

    If art is only pity and terror– that's such a sad thing to say. If abstraction isn't human, that's also very sad. Art isn't just old religious paintings that evoke religious feeling of terror or pity. Art is also confusing, funny, ironic, etc. I've been to the vatican and felt in awe every second– but that's an old type of expression. Art can't actually have that type of grandiosity anymore– there's too much skepticism in general in most people.

    Art is abstraction, so is philosophy, so is literature and how we interpret literature in our respective English classes. If abstraction isn't human, then Twain is pretentious for exploring the themes of gender/religion/childhood/race in Huck Finn and Moby Dick shouldn't be about anything more than a whale. That doesn't feel right to me.

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