Admiring a work of art often feels like an emotionally-enriching experience. But does engaging with the arts actually instigate demonstrable psychological change?
Scenario 1: suppose you’ve been gazing intensely at Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1659), which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and later you’re told that this was actually a painting made by a deep-learning machine that had internalised Rembrandt’s style through exposure to his paintings. You immediately feel that something’s lost. The museum would certainly take the work off its walls. What’s the thing that’s lost?
Scenario 2: recently, thousands of paintings covering almost eight miles were found on remote cliffs in the Amazonian rainforest; estimated age: 12,500 years. The Amazonian cliff art depicts humans dancing and holding hands, and now extinct mastodons, Ice Age horses with wild faces (some so detailed that the horse’s hair was shown) and giant sloths – like the weird creatures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. This made headlines. Standing face-to-face with these actual images on the rocks would be exciting. If the paintings turned out to be a hoax, we’d no longer feel the thrill of imagining the prehistoric humans perhaps so like us painting these images.
For me, as a psychologist with a special interest and expertise in the arts, our fascination with art raises two long-standing and fundamental questions, ones that have engaged philosophers, psychologists and art lovers. First, why are we so drawn to works of art? For their beauty, of course, but that can’t be all, as the thought-experiments above show us. Second, what kinds of demonstrable beneficial effects, if any, can engagement in the arts have on us?
As for the first question – why do we care so much? – I argue that we’re drawn to works of art because they connect us quite directly to the imagined mind of the artist. We believe that artists mean something by what they produce, even if it’s sometimes difficult to discern just what meanings were intended. And thus, whenever we take something to be art, rather than accident or functional artefact, we automatically read into it intentionality and meaning.
When we look at a Rembrandt, we feel like we’re reading a message sent to us today by this
