Cognitive Science in Search of Human Aesthetics
When researchers in Boston found that viewers appreciate professional abstract paintings more than abstract paintings done by children and animals, the conclusion was this: human beings delight in detecting human “intentions” in creative works. The abstract brushstrokes of a mature and mindful painter, in other words, come off differently from the brightly colored smears of a child or chimp armed with a brush.
The findings, coming out of Boston College and reported in Psychological Science this month, tear a page from the book of “cognitive science.” The cognitive question for art is whether all human minds, having the same natural origins, tend to find “meaning” or “beauty” in similar kinds of objects. Or, on the other hand, is all judgment of beauty purely a matter of culture, and thus different in Africa and Scandinavia, for example?
In the Boston research, the psychologists suggest that the brain naturally detects human “intention,” since the brain itself is an intention-driven organism. This is classic cognitive science: the brain is endowed to see “minds” in other things, but especially things that have the marks of mind, such as skilled handwork, even if this skill is hidden behind abstract configurations.
Not every human intention in art is appealing, obviously. In the study, a large fraction of the student participants liked paintings by a child, monkey, chimpanzee, gorilla, or elephant better than a comparative work by one of the ten top Abstract Expressionist painters of the past mid-century. We can sympathize with the difficulty for the Boston researchers. Some of the Abstract Expressionist works are simply not compelling. Even those legendary painters had many more bad days than good ones.
The real upshot of the research, however, supports the intention theory. Most participants favored the professional abstract painters. What is more, the subgroup of art students in the study preferred the professionals most. These art students, having done intentional paintings themselves, knew an intention when they saw one. They saw mind and skill behind abstract fields of line and color.
Recently, this debate on the brain and art has gone up a notch. The popular field of evolutionary psychology (about the same as cognitive science) presents the case that all cultures, based on the same human brain, have the same appreciation of craft, skill, and certain aesthetic attributes, like paintings with a blue lake and shady trees. The cultural relativists disagree, of course. They would say “taste” is determined by culture only. So, if Africans like a painting with a blue lake and trees, it’s only because they’ve been colonized by American kitsch calendar paintings.
We can be confident, however, that the scientific view is onto something. If a particular preference for a certain kind of beauty is deep within all human brains (related to a survival advantage over eons), then all human beings will roughly agree on which art is likeable and which is not. According to the Boston study, we tend to like art that shows mental exertion and skill—that is, intention.
Last year, the Johns Hopkins University Brain Science Institute, which researches “neuroaesthetics,” did an experiment to see if the brain has a common measure of beauty when it comes to shapes (or “shape aesthetics”). At the Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts it displayed French surrealist Jean Arp’s famous biomorphic sculpture, considered an epitome of a harmonious shape, and along side it dozens of similar shapes. The experiment, still being assessed, wants to see if museum-goers agree on which shapes are most appealing. (In another part of the experiment, the Institute has done MRI brain scans to see where blood flows when the different shapes are viewed).
At a forum on the project, a Johns Hopkins researcher conceded that something as general as shape might not be determinable in terms of “universal beauty.” Even if it were, according to an artist at the same forum, the role of the artist is to deviate from brain preferences for beauty, either to shock people or to train them to see beauty in deviations.
This re-training of the brain is the history of modern art, and especially abstract painting. The Boston research was motivated by recognition that people still have a hard time giving credit to abstract art. So the researchers seemed happy to find that if we detect human intention in abstraction—a mature human mind at work—we are pleased. “The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize,” they report.
Art history has its humor on this topic. Animals have been passed off as artists. At the 1912 Salon des Indépendents in Paris, three paintings done by a donkey tail—entered under the fake name of the dissident Italian futurist painter Boronali, a member of the avant-garde “excessivism” movement—drew favorable art reviews and were purchased. One donkey painting was titled, “The Sun Falling Asleep Over the Adriatic.”
An aimless donkey tail differs from human intention, of course. In the Boston study, the participants who mostly liked mature human paintings over child or animal expressions “were more likely to justify their selections . . . in terms of artists’ intentions.” Or as the researchers told Psychology Today: “This finding shows that we can see the mind behind [abstract] art.”
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