Art And Emotion: How Viewers Respond To What Artists ‘Intend’ And How It Impacts Aesthetic Appreciation

Feeling that you understand an artist’s intention, even if your perception is inaccurate, and feeling more emotion, influences how viewers positively rate the art, a recent study has found.

A group of 10 European scholars tested the ability of artists to systematically evoke emotions in an audience and how viewers discern artists’ intentions. “Together in the Dark?: Investigating the Understanding and Feeling of Intended Emotions Between Viewers and Professional Artists at the Venice Biennale,” published in Psychology of Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts, builds on an earlier exploration of installation artworks by MFA student-artists.

Matthew Pelowski, Eva Specker, Felix Haiduk, Paula Ibáñez de Aldecoa, Hillary Jean-Joseph, Helmut Leder, and Patrick Markey (University of Vienna), Beatrice Immelmann (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Germany), Giovanni Spezie (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), and Jane Boddy, wanted to probe deeper into how artworks “transmit” emotions.

Their latest collaboration involved a final sample of 113 participants (52 men, 60 women) who visited the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. The majority of the participants came from Europe and other Western countries, with a few from Asia and the Middle East. They had a range of art interests and previous training. The stimuli involved three distinct artworks by world-leading artists, embedded within a major contemporary art exhibition, as well as access to the curator, Cecilia Alemani, and her writings about the artists whose work was on view. An artist statement typically shares information about the artistic process, as well as the conceptual ideas implemented in the artwork. Many artists prefer to withhold “intention” from their statements and encourage viewers to respond to the work and installation itself.

The exhibition named Il mondo magico (The magical world) was inspired by a book of the same title by Italian anthropologist, philosopher, and historian of religions, Ernesto de Martino, giving viewers a sense of what to expect or what to feel.

The first artwork, Imitazione di Cristo (2017) by Roberto Cuoghi, was the largest piece in the exhibition and presented several stages of an assembly line for creating castings of crucified Christ figures cast in nearly life-size molds with a biological material resembling flesh-colored jelly, similar to the agar used in petri dishes. Each crucifix was laid out under clear plastic bubble material forming a long tunnel connecting several rooms. The biological material biodegraded, shriveled, and confronted the viewer with a stench of decay, and the shrunken Christ figures were hung on the wall.

The most noted responses to Artwork 1 were “mysticism” (identified by 40% of viewers, as intended by the artist), “unease” (38%, and untended by the artist), followed by “self-awareness,” “threat,” and “disgust.”

Artwork 2, The Reading, or La Seduta, (2017) by Adelita Husni-Bey, was composed of a set of bleachers in a semicircle facing a projection screen. Blobs of a soft gel-like material resembling crude oil was slathered around the perimeter of the room, and strands of white holiday lights, with plaster hands attached to the ends, were strewn across the floor. The video showed scenes of young people from the New York City area turning over tarot cards and discussing two opposing outlooks on the world: economic and magic.

For Artwork 2, the most noted emotions were “inspired” (20%), “mysticism” (17%), “empowered,” and “self-aware” (both 12%, with only the latter term intended by the artist).

The third artwork, Untitled (La fine del mondo) (2017) by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, took over a long rectangular room. The visitor entered the space to embark on a long, dark walk below metal scaffolding holding up a temporary ceiling toward a massive staircase. Upon ascending the staircase and turning around or sitting down on the steps, visitors encountered an expanse of dark, still water, as well as the exposed wooden beams, brick walls, ceiling, and a row of windows.

The most noted responses for Artwork 3 were “vertigo” (30%, as intended by the artist), “mysticism” (24% and unintended by the artist), “inspired” (22% and also unintended).

Viewing Artworks 1 and 3, “participants indeed reported feeling intended emotions more,” while “Artwork 2, on the other hand, did not show significance,” the scholars found.

Only 84 of the 113 participants viewed all three artworks, but the researchers said a subsequent assessment focusing on the 84 individuals who had seen all three artworks “returned similar patterns of significance.”

“Across all three artworks, a significant or nearly significant … relation was found for subjectively feeling that one understood the artist(‘s) intention, as well as for general amount of emotion(al) arousal (regardless of the specific emotions/intentions),” the scholars wrote. “ Interestingly, feeling more (that) those responses actually intended by the artist and, to an even more pronounced extent, ability to actually identify artist intentions were not significant predictors.”