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.
By the end of this module, you should be able to do the following:
In addition, you should also be able to discuss and provide examples of how our mind and senses influence our experiences of art. After all, the unique and particular nature of human neurophysiology is the foundation for all of our artistic experiences.
Many scholarly discussions of how we make sense of art often ignore the fact that we fundamentally experience the world through a body and a brain, and that neurological and physiological processes ground our reception of all sensory experiences, including those within the field of arts. For instance, our mind and our sense can create vastly distinct felt experiences of artistic products. Sights, sounds, smells, and textures that may be pleasant to many might be merely tolerable to some and downright uncomfortable to others. Young children, for example, are more likely to hear higher-frequency sounds than adults can, which has led to such interesting inventions as a high-pitched alarm that only under 25s can hear (Merrill, 2013). Children's taste sensitivities are partly determined by genetics (Monell Chemical Senses Center, 2005), while people around the world are sharply divided about whether they love or hate cilantro also because of genetic variation (Callaway, 2012). In short, we cannot be absolutely sure whether the sensory experiences of others are like our own.
Yet at the same time, we all have access to our senses because of our shared neurobiology. For instance, humans are prone to a number of visual, auditory, and even tactile illusions (Gallace and Spence, 2014), all of which can be harnessed for the purposes of art making, which the 19th-century French painter George Seurat did. He used what was known about the science of colors and how we perceive them to create an engaging sensory experience through his use of pointillism in his paintings (Phaidon, 2017; Munger, 2009). In the following activity, you will learn about a set of cognitive processes related to how we perceive the world which influences the reception (as well as having influenced the construction) of many works of art and design: the Gestalt (form and shape) principles of perceptual organization.
Allot 30 minutes
Read the three articles from The Interaction Design Foundation about these principles:
As you read about the Gestalt principles, consider whether they could apply to other sensory modalities such as hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Think about the impact the perceptual principles like these have on how we experience works of art. The Gestalt principles describe rules about how we visually perceive the world. These principles somehow explain why some works of art are considered to be beautiful or pleasing. The same principles have also been used in the making of art.
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.
Allot 15 minutes
Use the web to find out more information about mirror neurons and report your findings back to the class. Discuss how the theory of mirror neurons impacts our understanding we appreciate art forms like dance, theatre, and film.
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.
Allot 30 minutes
Watch the video "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger as a way to prepare you for the reading in Activity 9.2.
Allot 30 minutes.
Read (or revisit) Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which you previously encountered in Module 7. (Article available on MyPortal)
This time, pay attention to the shift in the way we perceive a visual work of art that Benjamin describes. Take notes on the following issues:
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.
Allot 5 minutes
In 2007, a staff writer at the Washington Post, Gene Weingarten, collaborated with one of the world's most celebrated musicians on a remarkable experiment. Dressed in a nondescript way, violinist Joshua Bell planted himself on the platform of the New York subway and busked. The performance he gave would have commanded top-tier ticket prices had he played the same program of music on any of the prestigious concert stages on which he typically performs. The result? He was mostly ignored by passersby and collected a rather underwhelming amount at the end of his performance (Weingarten 2007). When published, the story about the experiment went viral and subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize.
Seven years later, Mr. Bell played on the subway once again but, thanks to advance publicity, a massive crowd gathered and watched—silently, respectfully—Mr. Bell’s performance, after which they expressed their appreciation with rapturous applause (Contrera, 2014).
What does this story suggest about the factors that influence how we value a work of 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.
Allot 75 minutes.
To prepare you for this activity, read this very brief summary of Reception Theory from the Tate website.
Then read Encoding/Decoding by Stuart Hall. (Available on MyPortal)
While reading Hall’s article, pay particular attention to the following:
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:
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.
Benjamin, W. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (H. Arendt, Ed., H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken/Random House. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20171112061630/https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
British Broadcasting Corporation. (1972). "Ways of Seeing" with John Berger (Vol. 1). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20171228005008/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&app=desktop
Eumedemito. (n.d.-a). Laws of Proximity, Uniform Connectedness, and Continuation – Gestalt Principles (2). Retrieved February 9, 2018, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/laws-of-proximity-uniform-connectedness-and-continuation-gestalt-principles-2
Eumedemito. (n.d.-b). The Law of Similarity - Gestalt Principles (1). Retrieved February 9, 2018, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-law-of-similarity-gestalt-principles-1
Eumedemito. (n.d.-c). The Laws of Figure/Ground, Prägnanz, Closure, and Common Fate - Gestalt Principles (3). Retrieved February 9, 2018, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-laws-of-figure-ground-praegnanz-closure-and-common-fate-gestalt-principles-3
Hall, S. (1993). Encoding, decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The Cultural studies reader (pp. 97–103). London ; New York: Routledge. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20171004155817/https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/SH-Encoding-Decoding.pdf
Hunter, S. (n.d.). Why do we react differently? Reception theory explained. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xh9FjcQTWE
RevisionWorld.com. (n.d.). Reception Theory. Retrieved from https://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/media-studies-level-revision/reception-theory
Tate. (n.d.). Reception theory. Retrieved February 8, 2018, from https://web.archive.org/web/20180106190015/http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/r/reception-theory
Berrol, C. F. (2006). Neuroscience meets dance/movement therapy: Mirror neurons, the therapeutic process and empathy. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 33(4), 302–315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2006.04.001,
Callaway, E. (n.d.). Soapy taste of coriander linked to genetic variants. Nature News. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2012.11398
Contrera, J. (2014, September 30). Joshua Bell's Metro encore draws a crowd. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/joshua-bells-metro-encore-draws-a-crowd/2014/09/30/c28b6c50-48d5-11e4-a046-120a8a855cca_story.html
Fishwick, C. (2015, February 27). The science behind the dress colour illusion. Retrieved February 8, 2018, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2015/feb/27/science-thedress-colour-illusion-the-dress-blue-black-gold-white
Gallace, A., & Spence, C. (2014). In touch with the future: the sense of touch from cognitive neuroscience to virtual reality (First edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maranan, D. S. (2017). Haplós: Towards Technologies for and Applications of Somaesthetics (Ph.D. Thesis). Plymouth University, UK. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/10170
Merrill, J. (2013, June 19). Sonic youth: The high-pitched sound alarm for under 25s. Retrieved February 8, 2018, from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sonic-youth-the-high-pitched-sound-alarm-for-under-25s-8665652.html
Monell Chemical Senses Center. (2005, February 18). Children's Taste Sensitivity And Food Choices Influenced By Taste Gene. Retrieved February 9, 2018, from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050211084620.htm
Munger, D. (2009, February 25). Visual illusion may explain the allure of pointillist paintings. Retrieved February 9, 2018, from http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/02/25/visual-illusion-may-explain-th/
Phaidon. (2017, July 10). A Movement in a Moment: Pointillism | Art | Agenda. Retrieved February 9, 2018, from http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2017/july/10/a-movement-in-a-moment-pointillism/
Vadde, A. (2017). Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene. New Literary History, 48(1), 27–51. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2017.0001
Veronique Greenwood. (2012, June 18). The Humans With Super Human Vision. Discover Magazine, (July-August). Retrieved from http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision
Weingarten, G. (2007, April 8). Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out. Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html
Brouillette, S. (2007). Postcolonial writers and the global literary marketplace. In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (pp. 44–75). Springer.
Durham, M. G., & Kellner, D. (Eds.). (2006). Media and cultural studies: keyworks (Rev. ed). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20171004155817/https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/SH-Encoding-Decoding.pdf
Granelli, S., & Zenor, J. (2016). Decoding "The Code": Reception Theory and Moral Judgment of Dexter. International Journal of Communication, 10(0), 23.
Martin Irvine. (n.d.). Institutional Theory of Art and the Artworld. Retrieved February 6, 2018, from https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/visualarts/Institutional-theory-artworld.html
Ponzanesi, S. (2012). Publishing, prizes and postcolonial literary production. In A. Quayson (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (pp. 1127–1154). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107007031.016
Teel, A. (2017, May 3). The Application of Stuart Hall's Audience Reception Theory to Help Us Understand #WhichLivesMatter? Retrieved February 6, 2018, from https://medium.com/@ateel/the-application-of-stuart-halls-audience-reception-theory-to-help-us-understand-whichlivesmatter-3d4e9e10dae5
The dress. (2018, February 7). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_dress&oldid=824461744