Module 9: How Art is Received

When we experience a work of art, a host of factors come to influence how we perceive, make sense of, and evaluate it. In modules 7 and 8, you examined the factors that drive and influence the production and circulation of art. Thinking about art in terms of its production and circulation is very much based on a “sender-receiver” model of communication, wherein information is encoded by a sender, then transmitted over a medium, and finally decoded by a receiver. Similarly, art can be thought to be the realization of the intent of an artist (production) that finds its way to an audience (circulation) who then finally interprets the art work in an attempt to decode the artist’s original intent (reception). This module will focus on the question of reception: How is art received? We will look at this question using three analytical lenses: the body, technology, and society.

Culture and society also shape how we perceive the world. Moreover, it has also been argued that perception is a construct. . However, there are cognitive processes that play role that are difficult to change once they have been wired in our brains and encoded in our bodies. Consider for instance the theory of mirror neurons, which suggests that when we observe familiar human movement that is performed with intent and purpose, our neuromuscular system weakly activates in response in such a way that mirrors the movement of the person they are watching. Thus (the theory suggests) we enjoy watching dance partly because areas of our brain and our body fire as if we were dancing too.

How does technology affect the way we perceive and value art?

While many artistic works can be apprehended directly—such listening to a live performance of a piece of music or watching a choreographed work—there are works of art experienced with the aid of some kind of technology. Think about the differences in your experience of watching a movie in a cinema, as opposed to when you watch a rerun of it on your TV, a downloaded version on your laptop, or a streaming version on your mobile phone. When you attend a screening of a film, the experience involves making yourself presentable to the world, organizing transportation to get yourself to the cinema, meeting up with friends who will be watching the film with you, lining up to buy food, and so on. Contrast that to your experience of watching the same film on your mobile phone, which you might do on a long bus ride home, or perhaps in bed after you’ve brushed teeth and are settling in for the night.

Media platforms influence the way works of art reach us, and these differences have created an impact on the way we engage with, pay attention to, and make sense of artworks. In the following activity, you will explore one such issue related to technology—reproducibility—and how it can influence the way you appraise art.

Benjamin takes up the issue of the reproducibility and (re)presentation of visual art afforded by media technologies. He suggests that the prestige that is usually conferred to an artwork and its author—the aura—is devalued by the process of reproduction. Historically, part of the mystique and the value of a work of visual art is its “uniqueness” and the fact that it is located in a specific place, such as a museum or a gallery. High-fidelity copies of an artwork subvert the “specialness” of the work and the process of experiencing the work.

In the case of literature and music, reproducibility is the mode of circulation. However, books and songs need “valid” venues to reproduce or record them. Publishing houses and record labels authorize the reproduction of these art works. They convey the mystique of authenticity or originality. Does photocopying a book or downloading or re-recording a song diminish its value as a work of art? In the age of mechanical reproducibility, the work of art has become easier to access, even more so in the 21st Century when social media platforms readily make art available to audiences all over the world. How do the concepts of “originality” and piracy affect the way we receive works of art?

Do you think that Benjamin’s theory applies to all art forms? Certain kinds of products benefit from the so-called network effect, where increasing the numbers of people who possess a certain good improves that good’s value. Think, for example, of the telephone: a single telephone is utterly useless, and the more telephones there are in the hands of other people, the more valuable it becomes. Already, certain kinds of artistic products (such as networked video games) will require precisely for them to be mass-reproducible in order for them to have value to their audience. 

This is not to say that the the idea of the aura never applies in the digital and new media realm. Piracy is still very much an issue for certain kinds of digital artifacts, and including some (older types of) games. But for example, wildly popular networked games liked Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) is free. DOTA evolved from its predecessor, World of Warcraft, when digital designers, programmers, and artists were actively invited to co-opt, change, and redistribute it. DOTA, in other words, can’t really be pirated. The concept of the aura becomes much less easy to apply, and the more appropriate theory of value is a network theory of value. When you consider new creative forms and new ways that value is generated, one can perhaps see the limits of the applicability of the theory of the aura.

How do social and cultural systems shape the way we experience art?

Once we have experienced a work of art—either a direct encounter or mediated by technology—we begin to construct a set of impressions and judgments of it. These impressions and judgments are very strongly shaped not just by innate individual differences but also by the social and cultural systems in which we are embedded.

One attempt to describe how social and cultural systems shape our appreciation of an artwork is embodied in Reception Theory, which comes from media and communication studies and which discusses how we 'read' media products in particular.

According to Hall, any media product can be thought of as text, in that it has meaning and intent embedded. A television program, for example, can be thought of and “read” as a text. This television program is created within and by a set of systems, which Hall identifies as “relations of production”, “frameworks of knowledge”, and “networks of production”. The process of constructing this program is actually a process of encoding these systems into a set of meaning structures, and reading (as a verb) is the process the audience undertakes in decoding the program into a set of meaning structures particular to them. However, the reading (as a noun) of the audience of the meaning structures can take one of several forms: a dominant (or hegemonic) one, an oppositional one, or a negotiated one:

• A dominant reading occurs when the audience views the creative product in the way that is intended by its producer.
• An oppositional reading occurs when the audience rejects the meaning intended by its producer.
• A negotiated reading lies somewhere in between, where some of the producer’s meaning structures are legible and acceptable to the audience, while others are not.

Summary

In this module, we examined how factors intrinsic to ourselves (such as our previous experiences, prior knowledge, expectations, mood, and neurobiology) and extrinsic to ourselves (such as the environment in or medium through which we view a work of art, social conventions, and the opinions of cultural gatekeepers) influence how art is received.

While it is useful to think about art in terms of production, circulation, and reception, you may have realized that these processes can be intimately intertwined. Many of the issues tackled in Modules 8 and 9 on the production and circulation of art have relevance to issues of reception.

What an artist decides to produce may be influenced by what galleries, patrons, gatekeepers, and other taste-makers deem as artistically (or commercially) valuable. The same technological advances that have revolutionized our access to the tools of the production of art (such as digital video cameras or blogging platforms) and have led to the rise of "amateur creativity" (Vadde, 2017) have also changed the way we access and experience finished works of art (think of streaming services such as Netflix). New technologies such as virtual reality and 4D cinema, and emerging art practices such as molecular gastronomy, are exploring the possibilities and pushing the limits of the human sensory system. And with the rise of communities of artists who share content freely (such as Wattpad for fiction and stories), and even for redistribution and reuse (such as ccMixter for sound and music and Flickr for photos), the boundary between artist and audience is becoming increasingly blurred.