zen_tom

Have you ever gone into an art gallery, or seen a view, or beheld something that was awe-inspiring in some way?

What is the cause of this emotional response? i.e. What is it that makes us feel something when we see a picture, a statue, or something from nature?

Zeraph

I think art itself isn't beauty but more a trigger for beauty, and beauty is a certain feeling based on your life experiences. So in other words: beauty is a learned feeling and art triggers your memory of it.

zen_tom

It's just interesting that many of us are able to agree on what is beautiful and what is not. There was a thread on here before that was talking about how we might percieve colours differently, but that they all could be nailed down to the same frequency of electro-magnetic radiation.

Beauty however and the experience of it isn't (or is it?) something that can be measured, and yet we are all able to appreciate it - whether it's in the form of a landscape say at the top of a mountain, or a portrait, or a photograph, or a building or an abstract painting - all of these things invoke a shared sense of *something* - I'd like to hear people's thoughts on what that *something* is.

joeshoe

I'm guessing the feeling is the feeling of awe that is associated with a memory triggered by the art. But it might just be like any other emotion.

flstf

I think because of our shared genetic makeup and common experience being human creatures on this planet many of us agree certain of the same things are beautiful. Colorful sunsets, green landscapes, blue sky and water, and human faces being a few.

I'm not sure about the landscapes etc.. but I read somewhere that they did some studies on why we perceive certain faces beautiful. It seems that the more common (normal) the face is the more attractive we perceive it to be. They took thousands of faces and measured the feature sizes and distance between them. The faces that came closest to the normal dimensions were considered by most to be the most attractive. They morphed thousands of faces to come up with the norms. They found this to be true even in babies perceptions.

They theorized that we were genetically wired that way in order to pick a mate that was most likely to be healthy for reproduction. Don't know about the babies, LOL.

When it comes to visual art I think it gets more personal. Some people like Norman Rockwell realistic quaintness, some like the little kids with big eyes, some like the dogs playing cards, and some like Jackson Pollack type abstracts, etc..
I think it has more to do with developed taste like wine or music appreciation. I think there are certain sounds that most of us would find pleasing as well, but I don't think my parents would have agreed, LOL.

martinguerre

i disagree that it comes from memory. art very much creates somethign new with in us...and i think it is for that reason that it is so important.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

MSD

There is some genetic hard-coding for emotion, otherwise we wouldn't all feel them. It makes sense to me that if it is hard-coded, somthing about what our responses to certain stimuli will be is most likely in there with it.

CSflim

Well certainly you are using the hardware provided to you by your genes. The real question is, why does this hardware do as it does?
Is it an adaption, like most of our other features? What 'survival value' could an appreciation of beauty have?
If it is not an adaption, then where did it come from? Is it a spandrel?
How did that arise. (Despite what some people appear to think, shouting 'spandrel!' and leaving it at that is not a sufficient explaination!)
Are we barking up a wrong tree looking at it from an 'evolutionary psychology' point of view? Should we be lookign at nurture and environment? Is beauty merely "socially defined"?

These are big questions, and I certainly don't claim to have the answers, but I don't expect a simple all-in-one answer.

Perhaps at a first approximation, my answer might be "all of the above".

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zen_tom

Wow, spandrels! - CS, you have provided me with a word that I wished existed for so many years - many thanks!

I'm going to steer clear of the spandrel explanation for the moment, since I think there is a whole other post that could look into which of our most dearly held beliefs about what it is to be human may well be described as such. But back to the question, yes, there has to be some hard-wired something that makes us appreciate these things.

Some people have suggested that it's linked to our ability to percieve pattern and, since most patterns we percieve are natural, it suggests there is some quality about those patterns that we find most exciting. -

By the way, we could even extend this from art (which most people consider as being primarily visual) to music or drama.

ARTelevision

I don't experience "art" any differently than I experience anything else.

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zen_tom

Why not? Or rather, would you be able to explain how you experience the world, and how you experience art, and what the similarities are? I mean, obviously you will be using your senses, but your response to a piece of paper, and your response to a piece of paper drawn on by a five-year-old's crayon are going to be different, aren't they?

Zeraph

Speaking of faces, anyone else have problems remembering eye color? I can remember a person's face from years ago, but ask me even my friends eye color? No idea (well I can guess based on their hair.)

I have a feeling it's normal though, that there was no evolutionary reason to remember/pay attention to eye color. So you girls need to give us a break when we can't remember your eye color...

ARTelevision

zen_tom, no, my response would be the same.

I see things rendered up to my sensory experience as phenomena with particular histories, existences, and trajectories - as texts.

I look at all texts the same way - existentially. That is, I see them as products of my experience, my mind, my senses, and of outside agencies - sometimes the agent is human. As I move through various levels of deconstruction and/or comprehension, I come to certain tentative conclusions.

Why should I look at art any other way than the way I look at a tree, for example? I like Jackson Pollack's explanation of himself and his work. When asked why he didn't paint from nature, he declared, "I am nature".

Why should I look at a beaver dam any differently than I look at a work of art? Why should I look at a work of art any differently than I look at a machine?

Why should I look at a work of culture differently than I look at a work of nature?

I don't see any good reasons to do so.
So I don't.

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zen_tom

I like what you say here, about a thing having a history - when I see a painting that moves me, it's often when I see the detail of how the paint was applied to the canvas, and I begin to see the painter actually creating the work, feeling what it may have been that the creator felt.

A photograph has a different set of properties that move, and more often than not, it is the nature of the subject that is most exciting. Seeing and being able to study the pores and wrinkles on the skin of a portrait, or the range of colours in a landscape, the sense of space and again, history that can be evoked by a grand (or even not so grand) vista - but again, there is the human element where your attention is directed by the photographer, perhaps to see something different, or to think about something different.

If I see something that really grabs me, it is like talking to the artist themselves - this has only happened on a few occasions, but meeting the art was like meeting a person. I had previously thought there might have been some kind of aesthetic form, something that we find appealing, perhaps because it contains ratios we find comforting, maybe we are tuned to percieving the patterns that nature makes. But thinking now, I think a strong aspect of the responses I have are to do with the history of the piece - each brushstroke a testament to someone else, each itself an almost incontrovertable proof that I'm not alone, that other people have secret internal worlds and experiences just like my own - the piece is an artifact, a record of something important - and we are able to read and to feel the essence stored within.

martinguerre

Sounds awfully disengaged. I'm sure there are some benifits to that view...but it seems to reduce everything to the viewer's level of comprehension. One of the reasons i'm drawn to art is my self-awareness that i don't have the full text in front of me. communication, by its very nature, is going to be a process whose "outside agents" as you call them are not simply something to be analyzed. They're participants. This reductionism you espouse doesn't let them do that.

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

flstf

I have a similar view to an artists work. I am especially fascinated by the artists drawings and sketches. Particularly the ones not meant for display but are the result of the artist thinking out loud (so to speak).

Also the raw drawings of young children are wonderful. That is until we start to tell them what things are really supposed to look like.

ARTelevision

martinguerre, yes. I prefer a somewhat disengaged view of things.

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cybersharp

I think that the reason art, is so impresionable, or otherwise inspiring is because art is not only a concept of somthing, but a whole idea in itself made by the artist.

Making the art whatever it is physical.

Thus making a Idea in a physical form.

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Locobot

Its been mentioned that we do have a sense of aesthetic beauty "hard-wired" in our genetic code. This is true but it doesnt apply to (most) anything you could witness in an art gallery. Measured response from babies indicates that they react better to symmetrical smooth-skinned faces. This response serves evolution by shaping mate selection and possibly giving children an innate trust of mother figures. There is also a more important genetic response by adults when they see a baby, the "awww cute" heartswell. This serves the obvious evolutionary purpose of creating an emotional bond and fostering child-rearing behavior. This response is transferrable to species that are genetically similiar to us, but not to those which are genetically distant. Baby chimpanzees are much more likely to get an "aww cute" response than, for example, a baby cockroach.

An emotional response in an art gallery can only be said to be genetically based in the sense that we're able to fool the brain through representation. A photo of someone pretty can very easily stimulate the same response the viewer might feel if he or she were in the presence of that same pretty person (hence the titty board). This also explains Anne Geddes dubious career as an artist. She's not just taking photos of babies, she's manipulating our genetic response.

Not all genetic responses serve an evolutionary purpose, those are just the responses that are easiest to understand scientifically. We may have an ingrained genetic response that makes us fancy sunsets or mountainscapes or whatever. We'll never be able to tell exactly what is a learned appreciation and what we are genetically encoded to appreciate. My guess is that the vast majority of responses to work in a gallery is learned. There are many people who don't care for any of the art in galleries. It's assumed currently that these people have just never learned to appreciate art. It's possible though that these people are missing key genes which trigger the desired response. We'll never really know.

We do know that some people have a great difficulty understanding representation. To an autistic person a sculpture might just appear as a chunk of stone, they might not make the connection to what it portrays.

This is different from the detached view that ArtTelevision and many artist types take when viewing a work of art. A detached view allows a person to view a painting as layers of pigment on a canvas, the technique used, etc. These people are perfectly capable of understanding what is or isn't (in the case of abstraction) being represented.

roachboy

interesting...i dont think there is any particular genetic component to the apprehension of "beauty"....which is one reason why reading through this thread has been curious, in that so many folk seem like instant kantians on the matter.

for kant, the apprehension of beauty is a an experience rooted in the experience of the sublime, which itself is patterned on looking at something that is really fucking big, not being able to take it all in at once, with a resulting sense of vertigo.

if there is anything to kant's theory---i suspect that the genetic element has to do with vertigo, with anxiety about falling.

beyond that, the question of how one interacts with "art" seems more sociological than epistemological...dispositions are shaped more by social position than by features that you would find rifling through attributes that you imagine are lodged somewhere within the boundaries of your skull. for example, it is from a particular social situation that locobot can talk about being tricked into representation--even as i agree with much of what he says about it---in general, pierre bourdieu is good on this--check out "distinction" sometime.

museyrooms are funny places in any event: for me they are more about systems of classification and patterns of acquisition then they are about the objects classified and/or acquired. so i go to them and have an ambivalent experience. sometimes i run into pieces that i really quite like--i'll just stand for a while.

i dont think that standing there is "communing with beauty" because i dont know what the word means, really (do you?).

and i cant force myself to look at the works i encounter there existentially (as a function of particular modes of practice) because the whole organization of a museyroom is predicated on cutting works off from that dimension and replacing it with a fantasy, which is itself calibrated by the various ideologies of "art" that obtain at a given time.

but there are objects that i am happy to meet.
hello object, i say, nice to meet you.
i think i learn things from these objects.
but i am not sure what exactly.

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Locobot

You're just upset because I said baby cockroaches aren't cute.

real response tomorrow