Why Do We Like the Art We Like?
Standing in front of a painting and watching how others react to it can make you wonder: why do we like the art we like? It might leave you completely cold while the person next to you is transfixed? It turns out there may be a scientific reason for that. Researchers have built an algorithm that can predict which art you'll prefer by analyzing how your brain processes what you see.
Why We Disagree About Art
Pablo Picasso's artwork provides plenty of examples. HIs originality and distortions of the familiar fascinate some viewers (like me) and turn away others.
Some of our preferences are wired into us. We crave sugary foods because they once helped us survive. We also tend to agree on what makes a human face beautiful. Artwork is a different story. Much of what we value in it seems surprisingly arbitrary, which is why one person’s masterpiece is another person’s mess. To get at the reason, computational neuroscientist Kiyohito Iigaya and his colleagues at Caltech ran a large experiment ((Human Behaviour, 5(6), 743–755) They asked more than 1,300 volunteers who were crowdsourced online to rate 825 paintings from four Western styles: impressionism, Cubism, Abstract art, and Color-field painting. Everyone was over 18, but the team didn’t account for their familiarity with art or their cultural background, even though age, education, and culture are important in shaping what we like.
What the Algorithm Found
The researchers used an algorithm to look for patterns in the ratings obtained and found that paintings favored by the same groups of people tended to share certain characteristics. They fell into two categories based upon:
Low-level features are built into the image itself, like contrast, hue, and motion.
High-level features need a human to interpret them, like the emotion a painting stirs up.
People's preferences fit into three loose groups: those who liked concrete, clear images, those who liked dynamic images, and those who preferred abstract art. It's impressive that, even within these groups, the algorithm could predict an individual’s specific tastes.
What’s Happening in Your Brain
In a second round, six volunteers viewed 1,000 paintings each while their brains were scanned with fMRI. The visual cortex, which receives information from the eyes, appeared to combine the low-level features with the high-level ones. That blended information then seems to pass along to the brain regions involved in value judgments, which is how we end up with an overall opinion of “love it” or “not for me.”
What’s Good About Strange Art?
Strange, abstract, and surreal paintings are the ones in which the content isn’t obvious or departs from reality. Here’s what they have going for them.
They break our expectations. Instead of handing us a pretty scene, they push our brains into deeper thinking and feeling, challenge our assumptions, and leave us to decide what it all means. If they rock the boat, they do it on purpose.
They make you an active participant. The painting works like a mirror, drawing out your own emotions, memories, and interpretations.
They defy logic. Strange art speaks to feelings and sensations, so it doesn’t have to make logical sense to move you.
They’re about the experience. The point is the act of seeing, not naming the objects shown. The story stays open-ended.
They put the senses first. With no clear subject, the artist isolates color, texture, and composition, so you can appreciate the paint, shapes, materials themselves. It can feel calming and meditative or loud and energetic, a lot like listening to music.
They may be good for your brain. Studies suggest ambiguous and abstract art activates the visual cortex and value-related brain regions, and working to decode an image can be rewarding, much like solving a puzzle.
They can ease stress. Unpredictable forms pull your mind out of its usual routines and keep you in the present moment, a bit like meditation.
They push culture forward. Many strange paintings deliberately defy traditional ideas of beauty, and that rebellious streak helps redefine what art can be.
How to Look at Art You Don’t Understand
Next time you face a painting that baffles you, try this: stop trying to figure it out. Skip the hunt for logic. Let your eyes wander around and into the canvas, and give it a little time, even few minutes, to get to you. Once you quit searching for a reason, the painting often starts to click. You might even find yourself thinking that the painting seems more real than reality, It might broaden your appreciation and tastes -- and, it won't make you stop liking the other kinds of art you already like.
Comment below: What kind of art do like most? Will knowing the bullet points above lead you to look at unfamiliar art you may not initally like?
*(Iigaya, K., Yi, Sanghyun., Wahle, I. A., Tanwisuth, K., & O'Doherty, J. P. (2021). Aesthetic preference for art can be predicted from a mixture of low- and high-level visual features. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(6), 743–755
Instructive, interesting, informative.
Thanks