Oxford Researchers Note Trees, Miss Forest

I've read some pretty poorly designed research regarding art in my time-- or possibly merely poor reporting of valid research, or poor reporting on poor research-- but of those turds this one is pretty steamy.

According to The Telegraph researchers conducted brain scans on people while they showed them portraits by Rembrandt (prints or actual paintings were not specified). Some viewers were told the portraits were fakes, some were told they were "real." People generally reacted to the "real" ones using the same part of their brains that appreciates pleasure, like food and gambling. When people were told the paintings were fakes they scrutinized the picture to try to see why scholars regarded them as such.

Interesting premise, right? According to Nadia Khomami, who wrote the short article, the study ..."suggests that when we make aesthetic judgements on things like art, we are influenced by many different parts our brain- including what others have told us." So far so good.  And then:

Professor Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, and one of the conductors of the experiment said: “It is always better to think we are seeing the genuine article. Our study shows that the way we view art is not rational, that even when we cannot distinguish between two works, the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently. [...]The fact that people travel to galleries around the world to see an original painting suggests that this conclusion is reasonable.”

 Not quite, sir. Let me explain:

Behold! the electronic device you are using to view this blog post. It's pretty neat, right? Now what if I told you it was manufactured by highly trained monkeys? Does that change the way you feel about the device? Would you stop and examine it? Or: think of a song you like. Now what if I told you the songwriter was trained not as a rock musician but in traditional Japanese opera? Would you go back and listen to that song, examining it for the Japanese influence? People have sort of similar reactions to the information that Alicia Keys and Tori Amos were classically trained. Guess what? Your appreciation of something has been altered by "what others have told us."

But then the researchers added art and authenticity to the mix, along with all the classist, Eurocentric, elitist social baggage that comes along with it. We are a society where people are not generally well educated in art except the privileged few who attend universities, a society where art is generally seen as a hobby for a wealthy elite, where galleries and museums are associated with intimidation and snobbery. Where venturing an opinion about art is, frankly, terrifying. Moreover the general art world has spent the last three or four centuries spreading the myth that art is a magical phenomenon of powerful genius. The same art world that has built up a mythology of the Original (and just so happens to benefit financially from such an attitude). So perhaps-- just perhaps-- the enjoyment of a pretty painting is cut short when the viewer is presented with these pressures?

Or perhaps the act of examination versus pleasure-center appreciation is not a "better" or worse proposition. The researchers or writer did not mention if the part of the brain used to examine a fake painting is the part of the brain reserved for stuff that sucks.

Wouldn't it have been interesting to examine the idea that "the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently," by designing an experiment where similar obscure paintings are shown in a neutral fashion, some by artists the viewer will not recognize and others by, say, Mondrian? When you remove the real/fake better/worse premise I wonder, people will react to unrecognizable artists using the pleasure center referred to above? Or upon hearing that the art is the early work of a famous artist, will the examination process kick in?

And to address the last bit of the remark, about visiting galleries to see the originals, that is a misleading analogy. The reproductions to which we are accustomed are not similar paintings or drawings that we can view three-dimensionally; they are photographs of the work, usually printed in a completely different size, on flat shiny paper. Originals can sometimes look the same as their reproductions but they tend to look different and can actually be quite surprising in person, therefore you have to visit museums to observe the materiality, the brushstrokes, the size, sculptural angles, etc. It's not just an attitude toward the authenticity of the piece, it is an observable difference.

To compound the wrongness of this article it is titled, Our Brains Respond Differently to 'Fake' Art. As if to imply that it is the fakeness of the art which causes a chemical reaction due to its sheer inferiority, like magic, as opposed our attitudes being swayed by social pressures related to the authenticity of art.

I'm not holding my breath for Science and/or Research to approach art from a rational place of deeper understanding. Judging by the heaps of either smug or starry-eyed research, science-related people seem to take particular pleasure in debunking (and sometimes confirming) the elitist magical thinking that surrounds art (and fine wine), probably because they've bought into such thinking in the first place.

Sheldon and Leonard from The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon has an Idea; you can tel because he's pointing at his head. Leonard responds like a sad sack.

Liz Magic Laser

I enjoyed this writeup at ArtFagCity of Liz Magic Laser's performance piece, "I Feel Your Pain." It's a cool description of a complicated performance piece, which can be difficult to find (for me, anyway). It's so frustrating when someone discusses a performance piece but doesn't describe what it is or shows a completely cryptic photo of it.

What is it with contemporary performance and video art not being accessible to the general public? We live in a time where you can use technology to, you know, record stuff and share it. YouTube that shit! Copyright and ownership of the work is an issue, obviously. Your gallery pays you to show the piece or whatever-- I don't really know much about the business side of high art-- so you can't go sharing it willy-nilly. That needs to change. Whatever fucked up system exists that prevents me from ever being able to view Matthew Barney's Cremaster Series (a series of movies nearly impossible to obtain or view) in its entirety, it needs to be fixed. The music industry (and RIAA) are grappling with a similar distribution issue but an obscure recording isn't nearly as obscure as an obscure work of recorded performance or video art. And whereas Radiohead's free/pay-what-you-want independent internet release of In Rainbows was seen as pushing the envelope in a good way visual and fine artists are still struggling with general expectation that they give their work away for free.

And if you want to compare music and visual arts as industries you can see how the visual arts industry fucked itself over in the fifties and sixties. While music became more and more widely accessible to fans and inclusive of youth and counterculture, visual art became an all-or-nothing game of elitism and inaccessibility, where art was either a gigantic cumbersome canvas requiring a mammoth modernist cathedral in which to properly view it, or it was nothing. Of course plenty of art was created outside of this class framing and plenty of it has mass appeal: advertising, psychedelic art, hippie art, clothing (fashion), cartooning, fine art and fashion photography, sentimental schlock, and crafts (macrame, etc). And plenty of worthwhile art was created outside the class framing that didn't have mass appeal: "outsider" art, figurative art of any sort, art in the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance, and more. But it was staunchly unrecognized as art at all, and the Art World still will only generally recognize this stuff in "special," separate exhibits. And when the Art World does recognize "outsider" or "low" art as art it certainly helps if the art takes a bajillion dollars to produce, from slick surfaces to studios full of skilled laborers to sponsored major-museum site-specificity to the diamond-studded roladex of the artist (I'm thinking of Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwi, among many others). I'm not attacking artists here, I'm frustrated with the institutions, the galleries, the art power brokers, the collectors and the schools.

The kids from the movie Almost Famous. People were ready to connect with something deeper and the visual art industry missed the boat.

So while music became something that normal people felt like they clicked with and could own, art became something stand-offish and inaccessible to all but wealthy eggheads. In my experience people are much more likely to fearlessly approach unfamiliar music than unfamiliar art, more likely to talk about what they think about music than venture an opinion about art, and much, much, much more likely to be able to list off five contemporary musicians in every single musical genre than to be able to list any five contemporary artists. Thanks, class warfare.