Bullot & Reber (B&R) draw attention to a striking gap in the psychology of art: its failure to account for the role of historical and causal information in the appreciation of artworks. In this welcome contribution, they argue that art-historical contexts, which include artists' intentions, historical events, and social conditions, leave traces in artworks that can be consciously examined and reverse-engineered or that trigger processes associated with historical and causal reasoning. They outline a framework that incorporates these processes and identify fluency theory as an illustration of how the framework might be explored. In this commentary, a psychologist (WFT) and an art-historian (MA) discuss the utility of the framework and its potential for increasing dialogue between researchers in the two disciplines. We also comment on fluency theory as a possible extension and implementation of this framework.
B&R lament the lack of constructive dialogue between scholars of historical and psychological approaches to art and imply that psychologists and historicists disagree about the nature of art. In our experience, however, practitioners in the two areas operate at different levels of analysis and rarely evaluate theories that encompass both disciplines. The proposed framework invites increased dialogue between disciplines, but it is not clear that such interaction will replace a status quo that is polarized. The present authors conduct research with distinct aims and methods of adducing evidence. Aside from intellectual curiosity, we have little reason to interact on a scholarly level in order to conduct our research.
Does appreciation concern individual artworks? Not in our disciplines, which comprise individuals who appreciate art. The psychology of art is a branch of psychology that investigates mental phenomena such as memory, perceptual organization, attention, and emotion. Because psychologists are concerned with mental phenomena, they rarely focus on individual artworks. Instead, artworks provide stimuli for pursuing the goal of understanding mental processes. Similarly, most art historians do not restrict their activity to the examination of individual artworks but are concerned with broader questions. The examination of artworks is not an end in itself but a vehicle for understanding social, political, and historical issues. Increasingly, art historians do not restrict their investigations to high art – the focus of the target article – but consider a wider range of evidence collectively known as visual studies. What of non-academic appreciators? Appreciation beyond basic exposure often extends beyond individual artworks to satisfy other human aims – social goals, a sense of identity, spiritual aims, political motivations, or investment.
Most art historians are skeptical of theories that claim to be independent of cultural and historical influence. Ahistoric theories exhibit one of the most fundamental errors of reasoning in the field: the use of induction based on historically situated data to infer universal principles that transcend time and place. The psycho-historical framework allows that historical conditions can influence the forms that causal reasoning can take, but it nonetheless posits a universal inclination to adopt a design stance in some form. Many art historians would contend that the tendency to employ historical reasoning when engaging with artworks reflects conventions associated with specific historical and cultural contexts and are unlikely to be connected to art appreciation across all individuals, societies, cultures and historic periods.
To address this concern, Bullot and Reber B&R can expand the scope of the design stance to include any ideas that help to explain an artwork. This possibility highlights a conspicuous trade-off between conceptual precision and explanatory scope. Such a broad definition accounts for variability in the forms of causal reasoning exhibited by different people across cultures and historical contexts. However, it is unlikely that any one mental process can capture such a wide range of responses. As a hypothetical process, the concept of a design stance lacks precision. What kinds of historical or psychological data would count as evidence against such an expansive hypothesis?
Consider an individual who listens to Schoenberg's serialized music but cannot perceive or represent structural attributes such as tone rows and their transformations. She is incapable of appreciating the work at the level of basic exposure. Out of frustration (disfluency), she adopts an appreciation strategy based on conceiving the music as a soundtrack to an imaginary film. Using this strategy, she finds the music more accessible and rewarding. Her appreciation is characterized by an inability to perceive structures intended by the composer (basic exposure) and the recruitment of causal reasoning that is personal and imaginative (design stance). The strategy is also successful.
The example illustrates the need for elaboration of the design stance. First, such a strategy subverts the reverse engineering goals modeled by the framework. The listener is aware that the strategy is fanciful yet makes no attempt to extract genuine causal information because her strategy is effective. Indeed, such a strategy may be far more effective than acquiring knowledge about how Schoenberg composed the music using a revolutionary post-tonal strategy. Second, her path to appreciation moves through the modes of appreciation in a direction opposite to that implied in the psycho-historical model. Figures 1 and 2 in the target article illustrate unidirectional arrows that reflect a hierarchy of understanding, with basic exposure referring to elementary forms of appreciation, and the design stance associated with greater levels of skill, exemplified in scholars such as art historians. For serialized music, however, learning historical facts may confer trivial benefits in comparison with those of learning to appreciate structural aspects of serialized music. Conversely, in John Cage's silent piece 4′33", no amount of expertise can lead to increased appreciation at the level of basic exposure. That level is compositionally absent: appreciation at the level of design stance is primary.
An intriguing implication is that the relative weighting of basic exposure and the design stance depends on the nature of an artwork. Schoenberg's serialized music encourages adoption of the design stance because it is largely inaccessible; familiar music with pleasant harmonies is readily appreciated at the level of basic exposure with no need to resort to a design stance. Such differences in emphasis are captured by fluency theory. Artworks that are not easily processed at the level of basic exposure (disfluent artworks) induce contemplation about the reasons for this disfluency – adoption of the design stance. Hence, exposure to serialized music should give rise to a sensation of disfluency that, in turn, triggers a process of causal reasoning. Another plausible prediction, however, is that disfluency induces a wide range of responses, including withdrawal, indifference, imaginative thinking (e.g., hearing music as a soundtrack), and free association. All such responses are instances of causal reasoning broadly construed, but they are unlikely to reflect a unitary mental process.
It would be useful to clarify the connection between fluency and expectation. More than 50 years ago, Meyer (Reference Meyer1956) proposed that violations to expectations trigger arousal responses followed by an appraisal process, and his theory bears considerable resemblance to fluency theory. Could disfluency be a symptom of the violation of expectations that arise from internalizing persistent regularities in our environment?
A basic prediction of the psycho-historical framework is that gallery viewers exposed to historically informed “audio guides” should experience greater levels of satisfaction than those exposed to narratives or musical soundtracks that are equally engaging but unrelated to the causal and historical conditions that gave rise to the artworks. Evaluating such predictions may prove fruitful in the development of the psycho-historical framework and related proposals (Bloom Reference Bloom2010). Such research may also be valuable for galleries hoping to enhance the experiences of their patrons, regardless of whether such effects reflect historically specific, culturally specific, or universal processes of appreciation.
Bullot & Reber (B&R) draw attention to a striking gap in the psychology of art: its failure to account for the role of historical and causal information in the appreciation of artworks. In this welcome contribution, they argue that art-historical contexts, which include artists' intentions, historical events, and social conditions, leave traces in artworks that can be consciously examined and reverse-engineered or that trigger processes associated with historical and causal reasoning. They outline a framework that incorporates these processes and identify fluency theory as an illustration of how the framework might be explored. In this commentary, a psychologist (WFT) and an art-historian (MA) discuss the utility of the framework and its potential for increasing dialogue between researchers in the two disciplines. We also comment on fluency theory as a possible extension and implementation of this framework.
B&R lament the lack of constructive dialogue between scholars of historical and psychological approaches to art and imply that psychologists and historicists disagree about the nature of art. In our experience, however, practitioners in the two areas operate at different levels of analysis and rarely evaluate theories that encompass both disciplines. The proposed framework invites increased dialogue between disciplines, but it is not clear that such interaction will replace a status quo that is polarized. The present authors conduct research with distinct aims and methods of adducing evidence. Aside from intellectual curiosity, we have little reason to interact on a scholarly level in order to conduct our research.
Does appreciation concern individual artworks? Not in our disciplines, which comprise individuals who appreciate art. The psychology of art is a branch of psychology that investigates mental phenomena such as memory, perceptual organization, attention, and emotion. Because psychologists are concerned with mental phenomena, they rarely focus on individual artworks. Instead, artworks provide stimuli for pursuing the goal of understanding mental processes. Similarly, most art historians do not restrict their activity to the examination of individual artworks but are concerned with broader questions. The examination of artworks is not an end in itself but a vehicle for understanding social, political, and historical issues. Increasingly, art historians do not restrict their investigations to high art – the focus of the target article – but consider a wider range of evidence collectively known as visual studies. What of non-academic appreciators? Appreciation beyond basic exposure often extends beyond individual artworks to satisfy other human aims – social goals, a sense of identity, spiritual aims, political motivations, or investment.
Most art historians are skeptical of theories that claim to be independent of cultural and historical influence. Ahistoric theories exhibit one of the most fundamental errors of reasoning in the field: the use of induction based on historically situated data to infer universal principles that transcend time and place. The psycho-historical framework allows that historical conditions can influence the forms that causal reasoning can take, but it nonetheless posits a universal inclination to adopt a design stance in some form. Many art historians would contend that the tendency to employ historical reasoning when engaging with artworks reflects conventions associated with specific historical and cultural contexts and are unlikely to be connected to art appreciation across all individuals, societies, cultures and historic periods.
To address this concern, Bullot and Reber B&R can expand the scope of the design stance to include any ideas that help to explain an artwork. This possibility highlights a conspicuous trade-off between conceptual precision and explanatory scope. Such a broad definition accounts for variability in the forms of causal reasoning exhibited by different people across cultures and historical contexts. However, it is unlikely that any one mental process can capture such a wide range of responses. As a hypothetical process, the concept of a design stance lacks precision. What kinds of historical or psychological data would count as evidence against such an expansive hypothesis?
Consider an individual who listens to Schoenberg's serialized music but cannot perceive or represent structural attributes such as tone rows and their transformations. She is incapable of appreciating the work at the level of basic exposure. Out of frustration (disfluency), she adopts an appreciation strategy based on conceiving the music as a soundtrack to an imaginary film. Using this strategy, she finds the music more accessible and rewarding. Her appreciation is characterized by an inability to perceive structures intended by the composer (basic exposure) and the recruitment of causal reasoning that is personal and imaginative (design stance). The strategy is also successful.
The example illustrates the need for elaboration of the design stance. First, such a strategy subverts the reverse engineering goals modeled by the framework. The listener is aware that the strategy is fanciful yet makes no attempt to extract genuine causal information because her strategy is effective. Indeed, such a strategy may be far more effective than acquiring knowledge about how Schoenberg composed the music using a revolutionary post-tonal strategy. Second, her path to appreciation moves through the modes of appreciation in a direction opposite to that implied in the psycho-historical model. Figures 1 and 2 in the target article illustrate unidirectional arrows that reflect a hierarchy of understanding, with basic exposure referring to elementary forms of appreciation, and the design stance associated with greater levels of skill, exemplified in scholars such as art historians. For serialized music, however, learning historical facts may confer trivial benefits in comparison with those of learning to appreciate structural aspects of serialized music. Conversely, in John Cage's silent piece 4′33", no amount of expertise can lead to increased appreciation at the level of basic exposure. That level is compositionally absent: appreciation at the level of design stance is primary.
An intriguing implication is that the relative weighting of basic exposure and the design stance depends on the nature of an artwork. Schoenberg's serialized music encourages adoption of the design stance because it is largely inaccessible; familiar music with pleasant harmonies is readily appreciated at the level of basic exposure with no need to resort to a design stance. Such differences in emphasis are captured by fluency theory. Artworks that are not easily processed at the level of basic exposure (disfluent artworks) induce contemplation about the reasons for this disfluency – adoption of the design stance. Hence, exposure to serialized music should give rise to a sensation of disfluency that, in turn, triggers a process of causal reasoning. Another plausible prediction, however, is that disfluency induces a wide range of responses, including withdrawal, indifference, imaginative thinking (e.g., hearing music as a soundtrack), and free association. All such responses are instances of causal reasoning broadly construed, but they are unlikely to reflect a unitary mental process.
It would be useful to clarify the connection between fluency and expectation. More than 50 years ago, Meyer (Reference Meyer1956) proposed that violations to expectations trigger arousal responses followed by an appraisal process, and his theory bears considerable resemblance to fluency theory. Could disfluency be a symptom of the violation of expectations that arise from internalizing persistent regularities in our environment?
A basic prediction of the psycho-historical framework is that gallery viewers exposed to historically informed “audio guides” should experience greater levels of satisfaction than those exposed to narratives or musical soundtracks that are equally engaging but unrelated to the causal and historical conditions that gave rise to the artworks. Evaluating such predictions may prove fruitful in the development of the psycho-historical framework and related proposals (Bloom Reference Bloom2010). Such research may also be valuable for galleries hoping to enhance the experiences of their patrons, regardless of whether such effects reflect historically specific, culturally specific, or universal processes of appreciation.