2/5/2025 | 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM | Grand Peninsula B

Aesthetic Experiences: Is there an art-specific processing mode? comparing the experience of art appreciation in a gallery and a shop context using VR

Author(s)

Itay Goetz
Jennifer Tesch
Dragan Jankovic'
Claus-Christian Carbon

Abstract

When people engage with art, they accept and even embrace feelings they often tend to avoid. These include, among others, the experience of negative emotions, peak emotions, cognitive challenges, semantic instability, uncertainty and more. For about 300 years, philosophers and psychologists of art have argued that when people engage with objects identified as art, they adopt a cognitive mode distinct from everyday processing that affects subsequent interaction with these objects. We addressed this experimentally through a VR (Virtual Reality) study. Thirty-two participants were randomly assigned into one of two experimental conditions, where they freely interacted with the same nine unfamiliar artistic pictures from a variety of styles presented either in an art (gallery) or everyday (shop) context. Participants expressed their experiences via a think-aloud protocol and the Art Reception Survey (ARS). Additionally, the dynamics of viewing distances were recorded, and participants also completed open-ended questions and questionnaires immediately after the VR experience and two weeks later. While the quantitative evaluative data did not yield significant differences between both contexts, the qualitative data revealed fundamental experiential differences. These findings strongly suggest that an art specific mode may indeed exist. What is more, the findings point at numerous similarities between the processing of art in our study and our concept of MAX (Mode of Art eXperience), which unifies the numerous previous approaches describing this phenomenon. Namely, we found that the processing of art de-automatise everyday goal-directed practical processing and calls for deeper engagement with artifacts, search for meaning through associative thinking and weighing of interpretive, competing interpretations, imagination, openness to peak affective experiences, and more. Importantly, the existence of such mode points at the power of art to drive societal change: Art encourages and even pushes people to engage in critical thinking, consider ideas from perspectives different from their own, feel sympathy towards otherwise neglected topics and people and more.